My battle with Earthlink

[Michael Butash]

Try running an mtr to a site when it occurs, see if you're losing your 
first-hop gateway (transport or head-end issue), or if you're getting 
any further upstream and breaking (something inline is halting your 
connection).  DSL is typically atm handoff to the L3 provider like 
earthlink, so your session is transported generally via a few 
encapsulated protocols that can break along the way.

I'd venture to say it's your transport, first-mile that's broken here, 
but I've not used or worked on dslams personally to know how ugly they 
break, when they break.  This is known as a "type 2" relationship, that 
CL will provide last-mile to earthlink via atm pvc, so anything goes as 
you pass between vendors along the way.  Like most big enterprises, they 
might not monitor per-user connections to see just what happens if/when 
it breaks (ie. flatline in usage), so you might be up a creek with the 
local agent.  This is dated info too, not sure vdsl variants are still 
atm (I certainly hope not).

If they can see any kind of dslam status, they can probably see physical 
errors, or not to know if your modem is at least impared from a 
last-mile wiring perspective.  I don't know how this info manifests with 
what they'll actually tell you being a telco, and 2nd hand remove at 
that.  Cox has tools internally that look at modem levels historically 
since 2003 or so, and if you can get a lazy tech to look at it, 
sometimes they'll be like "oh, yeah it does suck - let me get you a tech 
call".  YMMV with dsl, but anything related to a bell typically is 
terrible at fcaps monitoring it it seems.  I avoid them like the plague.

-mb


On 02/17/2013 09:24 PM, Derek Trotter wrote:
> It is in bridged mode.  I have it connected to a netgear router.  The
> problem I described happens whether or not I use the router.   I plugged
> the modem directly into both computers one at a time and still the
> problem persists.
>