Reliability of Provider

If you had an ISP giving you a shaky connection and you wanted to prove how reliable or unreliable the connection is, how would you go about it?

I have a Cisco 831 connected to cablemodem, if you want to know my infrastructure.

I'm about to move and will going to a location where Mediacom is the provider, but Time-Warner has been up and down. If this were the entire picture, I wouldn't care since I will be gone. But my father has Time-Warner cablemodem nearby and I'm curious as to how reliable his connection is. He's got a Linksys VOIP router (Vonage) connected to it.

Time-Warner doesn't seem to be very concerned about the problems we've been experiencing. Truthfully, hey should be embarrassed.

In fact, they refused to take a trouble ticket from me because the cable service at this location is in the landlord's name. Even though the service was completely down, they refused to take a trouble ticket unless the landlord called them and reported it.

It turned out that it was an area wide outage (that was a few days ago). And it appears that one is happening again as I type this. This message will go to this newsgroup when the connection comes back up.

I would like to find some way to monitor the reliability of my connection and produce stats to show its reliability in case I have to take it up with the cablemodem ISP.

Suggestions are most welcome.

Fred

Well, Brad,

I'm in move mode now. I'm trying to finish getting out of my old place here in Columbia by the time the weekend is over. Am supposed to be getting my household affairs in order in Sylva this week. I've already got my cablemodem installed and my VOIP phone for the rental house in Sylva. I've got to load my home network into the car and transport it up there before I can get fully wired there.

As soon as I get settled, I'll try to arrange a time to stop by. Will be in touch and I'm very much looking forward to meeting you and your folks.

That link you gave me looks promising. A dollar a week to monitor the reliability of your connection isn't bad at all. I wish I had had reports of this nature for Time-Warner. We've had two catastrophic outages down there this week alone. The first time, they refused to take a trouble from me on it because the cablemodem service is listed in my landlady's name saying that she'd have to call it in. Isn't that ridiculous? But, I'm stopping by their office tomorrow to drop off the cablemodem. The only thing is that my father will still be using their service here in this area and he is using Vonage for his telephone service. Maybe I'll arrange for these folks to monitor his connection, too.

Hopefully, Mediacom will be better for me. I've heard some say not so. But to be truthful, my first impressions and experiences with them have been much more positive than my interactions with Time-Warner. Mediacom seems to know what they're doing and the couple of minor issues I've had they've addressed very quickly. When I squawked because I was getting a private dynamic IP address (in the 10 range) from their DHCP server, they upgraded me to a public IP address rather quickly. My Voicepulse phone didn't work with the private one. When they upgraded it, the phone started working.

Regards,

Fred