Internet Frustrations

I've been having an issue with Time Warner's high speed internet (road runner) for a few weeks now. I realize that this likely falls outside what many might be able to help with, but ANY help or advice at this point will help.

My signal looks clean and fast to both Tw's phone support and the technicians they send out to repair. But it's not, or at least it's intermittent. Rarely a webpage won't load at all. Sometimes they only half load, where pics won't load and text is loaded minimally. The rest of the time it is loading slower than it was a month ago, but I get the whole page. It's almost as if the data is chunking itself together, then there's a short timeout, then a bit chunk comes, etc.

Running various internet speed tests always yield the same results: 6mb down and 500k up. But a tracert to anywhere shows a timeout on hop 1 (hop 2 when I'm using my router) and then the rest continues normally. With the timeout on hop 1, the config goes: PC > Cable modem > wall.

After two repair techs came out, a T3 phone rep told me today that they enabled some ?CMPT? process on their end awhile ago that is going to show that hop timeout but there's no loss of data or speed. They offered no explanation of what this process does and I've never heard of it, let alone why is it purposefully timing out on that first hop?

Any thoughts on what I might do to fix this, and is what TW is telling me correct?

Time Warner, as in cable or you using DSL? If it's mostly evening, gotta remember, if using cable, your essentially on a shared connection, so if a lot of people are on, it will be slower.

Also, if you run AVG antivirus, maybe uninstall it and try Avast. I used AVG myself, always liked it pretty good, but read something today that it can look like a denial of service attack with the way it checks out websites. That could have something to do with it as well......

The first hop timeout is not necessarily indicative of an issue. My ISP uses a nonroutable subnet for the first hop. I can still tracert to it, but some ISPs totally filter the cable modem control subnet off from both sides (subscriber and Internet). They typically do this so you can't access the network they use for the cable modems (i.e. firmware updates, control protocols, etc).

As far as the issue you're having, sadly it happens. I had almost the exact same thing happen on a business cable connection a few months ago. It would work fine for a while, then it would go down entirely or certain sites wouldn't load. They replaced the router twice and sent about 5 different techs out, each time they would say they replaced some different thing but that they couldn't find anything wrong. In this case, you have to be persistent and have some way of showing them you really have a problem. A simple way might be running a constant ping to some remote address (or even the next hop) and if it loses packets or has bad latency, bring that to their attention. There's an app out there that will do this for you with pretty graphs...I don't remember the name of it. Smokeping is one, but it's more complicated to setup and I think it only runs on *nix. Just google for ping grapher and you'll find the Windows version I'm talking about.