After months of fighting with CableOne about speed and service problems, I decided to finally spice up my website dedicated to their poor service: www.iscableoneshitty.com
Now, instead of just saying "YES," it gives an actual representation of the quality of the connection to my house. The server pings my modem 5 times at the top of every minute. It takes the response times and averages them.
If the average response time is <60ms, it reads "NOT CURRENTLY."
If the average response time is between 60 and 100ms, it reads "MOSTLY."
If the average response time is >100ms and <150ms, it reads "YES."
If the average response time is >150ms, it reads "VERY YES."
I've distributed to friends and neighbors in the area, because almost every one in my town is on CableOne for lack of other choices, so they can check and see if at least someone else is having trouble.
I have thoughts of actually tracking the data and compiling monthly reports of downtime and slowness, I just haven't gotten around to that yet.
I work at an ISP.. and ... ah.. they're shitting bricks about it, because now they'll have to live up to the speeds and reliability they've sold to customers :)
I thought about making a tool like this as well as crazier ideas like getting my lawyer to sue them for their incompetence - as it happens they are my only option for broadband.
What I'd like and I think alot of other customers would like is a little app to run on my computers that tracks when my internet connection goes down and for exactly how long. I pay a fixed amount monthly. As I'm concerned that pro-rata amount of lost connection time should be refunded to me from the ISP. There is no incentive for them to get better unless they lose money from their shit service.
I think it'd be a good adware product to cover basic expenses, and maybe some money could be made by taking a peice of crowd funded lawsuits vs ISPs. With my ISPs customer base, I don't think it'd be too hard to find contributors...
while [ "true" ]
do
printf 'google_ping %f %s' $(ping -c1 www.google.com | awk '/ms/ {print $7};' | awk -F '=' '{print $2};') $(date +%s) | nc graphite_host 2003
sleep 10
doneI have a local VM with Routers2 installed, which pings our LAN router, the TW modem, the first TW hop, and one of our VMs at Linode. The latency spikes start at the first TW hop. Routers2 provides great insight in to how TW is performing.
You can get Routers2 here: http://www.steveshipway.org/software/
We could see how often internet went down, based on how many times the boxes sent us "stored" data.
We didn't do any analysis on the data, but we did note that the residential internet while good isn't as always on as you think it should be. We were wondering how much of a problem this was going to be for home automation. (It would be frustrating not to be able to connect)
Also of note in the three years I was there before I left, its seemed to be getting better. It might be that the business switched more to corporate customers and there internet was better. We ended up doing some thermostat control and it worked for the most part (Most wifi thermostats are kinda crappy, thus the rise of the nest)
In other words: a residential customer is more likely to accidentally unplug their modem, or maybe flip a lightswitch that controls an outlet that the modem is plugged into, or accidentally flip the switch on their surge protector, or turn their modems off at night to save electricity, or to have old/bad cabling running from the telephone poles that need replacing.
I think that has something to do with it. Business too have blocks of time (nights) when the internet can go down and nobody is going to call for service. I wasn't involved with the network provisioning but often we were put on the same network as the "guest wifi" as opposed to the business network or the network with the cash registers (for security reasons)
I currently don't account for that. I guess I could ping something always stable like 8.8.8.8 or something as a baseline to compare against.
If the text doesn't fit on your screen -as it fails to on mine-, then either your screen is physically too small (as mine is), or your user-agent (or windowing system, or display, or video card drivers) is broken.
Edit: Scratch that. Resizing to a larger linode now. This got far more traffic than I ever expected it would.