Creative Misconfiguration

And now for a little bit on my experiences with my ISPs themselves, to give a little more background about why I even needed a second connection.
SFU’s residence has a mandatory internet connection that costs $127.16 per semester (or ~$32/month). During my first year here (2007/2008 school year) it was being run by ConnectWest Networks, a subsidiary of Data Fortress, and there were many reliability issues with it all school year, the largest of which was caused by a virus attack compounding poor network planning. A virus attack, which a friend and I diagnosed and informed ResNet about, but that’s a story for another post.
The unreliability was even worse in the fall semester of 2008, which by time the start of the semester rolled around, was completely out for almost two weeks. According to monitoring software I was running (just a version of MTR with aggregate stats, actually) for most of the fall semester, packet loss was an average of about 20% for the semester, although it was mostly grouped into large blocks of huge packet loss.

ResNet's quality since I installed PFsense. The little break is a period when I was having some issues with my server and the large break is form when it was down when I wasn't at school. This is over a six month period, showing twelve hour averages. Over the period, the internet was never out for longer than a couple or hours, which is why there is no spike to 100% loss shown.

This starkly contrasts to my Shaw connection, which has been down less than four hours while I’ve been monitoring it, and has only been down on three separate occasions. Once, and the longest, was about three hours do to a car crash which took out a power pole and Shaw’s plant on it. The other two I don’t know the causes of, but one may be due to someone’s improperly connected TV. Shaw wasn’t sure about that one either.
Oh, did I mention I pay about $35 a month for Shaw (through the student plan) which offers a more reliable connection that is only ~$3/month more money? Additionally, Shaw offered to credit me back every time I’ve called them about internet downtime, whereas for the number of times ResNet has been down/slow/unreliable, I only received a $16 credit for what should have amounted to a full refund for the semester (at home Shaw credited us for two months of somewhat unreliable service when we were among the first people in town to upgrade to DOCSIS).
ResNet is trying to make things better though, undergoing a large infrastructure upgrade to increase the bandwidth locally, which was not nearly enough for the amount of people using the network and possibly transferring files between each other. For comparison I have a faster internal network for my few computers and have deployed faster network for a few hundred people than they did for around 1800 people.
Additionally, the off campus connection is a measly 200Mb/s (at least, last I knew about) for 1800 people, which given us a contention ratio of 90:1 (1800 people with a 10Mb/s connection) which is much higher than Shaw, who supposedly is closer to 25:1-35:1 depending on neighborhood. This means that at peak times, the internet slows down quite a bit. I have never noticed a corresponding slowdown with my Shaw connection.

So, all in all, I’m happy with my Shaw connection. But my ResNet connection certainly isn’t worth what I’m paying for it, especially compared to my Shaw connection.
I, however, appreciate the changes that the new ISP, Urban Networks, is doing to improve the situation, but I still have at least one connection interruption about every day on average, though they generally only last a few seconds. How the network performs come fall, when there are many more people on it, remains to be seen.

Tags: internet, ISP, ResNet, RezNet, SFU, Shaw

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 6:53PM and is filed under Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.