December was another month of ResNet’s continual instability and, despite lower load due to people not being around for the winter break, it still managed to have more outages than any of the previous three months.
Due to a power outage scheduled with insufficient notice, I was unable to log around four days worth of data. But even with fewer days, ResNet was out in some form or another 126 separate times, which is more than any other month that detailed logs were kept for.
December 13th was notable for thirteen separate outages, which is among the highest I have seen. There was high latency (~600ms to about 3s) to the gateway for about two hours on the 7th.
Additionally, there was a rogue DHCP server causing some people connectivity issues, and somehow the ISP left it going for nearly a week. Whether or not they took it off or the owner fixed it is unknown.
There were no major outages, save the internet going down when the power was out. Why there are not have battery backups on their equipment is rather strange, but given the track record of the equipment, rather unsurprising. It would have been nice to have some notice that the internet was going to be interrupted when the power was out, but the ISP and Residence do not seem to make any attempts to keep their customers informed.
Interestingly, there were more minor outages this month than any month prior, but unlike the previous two months, no major outages occurred. I was actually hoping to see a few days where the internet worked properly,over the winter break when most residents were at home, but true to form, ResNet couldn’t even handle the reduced load placed upon it.
Unfortunately, I can’t give an overall uptime due to a technical glitch caused by the power outage, but I do have enough data to give average speeds that the network performed at.
Downstream speed continued being poor at roughly 12Mb/s (or roughly the same as last month’s), while upstream was also a poor at around .72Mb/s.
Average ping to the gateway, on the other hand, was up roughly 15%, which on a roughly static network, is a little odd. It does seem to indicate poor network management practices.
All in all, I wish I had something better to write about, but the network continued to fail at anything other than basic service. Problems such as poor network configuration (manifesting itself as traffic shaping on the outbound link to SFU, which should not be shaped at all) still plague the network, even though some have existed for quite some time.
All in all, another month of lame service for too much money.