In our case the problem as both a crimped line above our house and something with a gateway farther back within Cox. We found the problem mostly by running traceroutes.

If you need more help, contact me directly at my firstname AT lastname dot com.

Any resolution to this yet? I’m on the Mesa in Santa Barbara where there are a lot of City College rentals (i.e. lots of online gamers and video streamers).

Because of the overload, in June of 08 Cox added a new node to this neighborhood and, for a while, things were very much better. The problem now is not speed but latency. Once locked into a site download speeds exceed 20 Mbps, but every so often, like at least twice an hour, both computers here go into a trance when trying to initiate contact with a new URL.

My initial thought was DNS, so I flushed the DNS caches and switched DNS servers (from from 4.2.2.3 and 4.2.2.2 to Open DNS 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222). That didn’t help so yesterday I bought a new modem from Cox (a Motorola SB5101 to replace the suspect SB5120).

My hopes were up for the first hour, which went by without a hiccup, but then, and again all day today, we’re back to the same old tedious business. Sigh. I guess I’ll be calling Cox on Tuesday but meanwhile I’d be grateful to hear how this last thread worked out.

I’m familiar with Wake Forest. My uncle, a big Wake fan, went to Wake when it was still in Wake.

Has there been a speed increase lately from your service? I think these problems show up when the carrier upgrades something and it hoses downstream devices — including their own gateways and such. I think that’s the case here. Certainly my own old gear in the house didn’t help.

For the past week or so, I’ve been seeing VERY intermittent problems similar to yours Doc.

Several times a day, ping times to say google.com go up to 4000ms or higher, traceroutes never complete. Then things go back to normal. It’s so intermittent that I haven’t been able to rule out my router, but it does SOMETIMES happen with a direct laptop to model connection.

In my case this is a DSL connection. I’m in Wake Forest, NC (Raleigh neighbor, not Winston-Salem which is where Wake Forest University moved in the 1950s), and my isp/telco is WindStream.

I also think the Net needs to be built out increasingly from the edges in, rather than the centers out. And that we stay open to the inevitable improvements in the Net itself.

Absent a generally agreed-upon understanding of what the Net is, all the above will be hard to pull off.

Very interesting stuff pending – mix of fiber and wifi with totally open (IP structure) system, nice mesh and redundancy options.