The Telenet Case Study

Yes indeed it has been a while since my last post. Was I too lazy to write something? Partly yes, partly no. I’m having quite a bit of technical problems with my internet connection these days. After having 3 mechanics failing to solve the problem and calling my internet provider Telenet about 10 times I’m losing faith. I will present this as some sort of case hoping that someone knows what to do.

So what’s the problem? Well it’s kind of a strange story actually. Since April last year I became a customer of Telenet. A Belgian internet provider with a monopoly when it comes to providing internet via the cable in Belgium. It’s quite an expensive internet provider but we really like their digital tv and the speed of the internet they provide. But about 3 weeks ago things started to go really wrong for me. Out of nowhere my internet totally slowed down without any reason but got back on speed by itself after some time. This happened a few times a day and made me believe that Telenet was having some temporary technical problems. But most of the time I still had internet at full speed. The following days the problem of this sort of fading internet still kept repeating itself. When having these problems my download could get 10x slower, my upload 20x slower and my ping could rise from about 20ms to about 3000-5000ms (yes really!). This high ping really makes visiting websites miserable. And now since a few days ago there are no more enjoyable periods where the internet works just fine so that makes me writing this while measuring a ping of 3873ms on http://www.speedtest.net/. My download seems to be fine at the moment but this is only temporary. I’ll get into more details with a timeline.

Timeline:

April 2009 – Became customer of Telenet

August 2009 – After a few days of slow internet I contacted Telenet via e-mail but magically the internet got normal again shortly afterwards. No idea if there is any connection.

End of November 2009 – The internet gets really really slow but I didn’t look into it because I thought I had downloaded too much which would have put me on small band. Afterwards this appeared to be a false assumption.

Begin of October 2009 – Starts with a few days with really slow internet followed by some good days.  The problem keeps coming back however making me think that there is a problem with my laptop. But then I notice something strange: my pc has the same problem at the same time! My laptop and my pc (with both another ‘cabled’ connection) get slow at the same time but also regain their speed at the same time. So this way I could exclude technical problems on my laptop / pc as the cause of the problem.

Middle of October 2009 – I called to the helpcentre of Telenet about 10 times. Each time I spoke to another person which made me explaining my problem as many times. Everyone had a slightly different approach when trying to help me but in the end it all came down to this: “ Can you try our speedtest sir and tell me the results?” I did this over and over again. But in the mean time a Mechanic from Telenet came to my house to fix the problem. He replaced my modem with a new one and also replaced the Switch. Because the problem was not present at the time he was at my house (my internet had a good moment…) he could only see perfect scores on all the tests that he did. Later that day however, when he was gone, my internet slowed down again for a long time. I also tried the speedtest when connecting my laptop directly with my modem. At first it seemed that there was no problem to be found here because I always seemed to get good results when doing this. But then on a day that I needed to download something and my internet was too slow to do the job I tried this trick again… but this time it didn’t work. So I even got bad download, upload and ping results when connected directly with my (new!) modem. When I reset the modem my internet will regain it’s speed but mostly that only lasts a minute or so. Sometimes this helps for a longer period tough. That’s why I called Telenet again (one of those 10 times…) and they send me once more a mechanic to solve the problem. He replaced the only devices from Telenet that weren’t replaced the first time. Again the mechanic could not see my problem because the internet was behaving normal when he was in my house. A day later I called Telenet again to report that the problem still existed which they could measure for the first time themselves at that time. They send me a mechanic from Infrax to check if the signals I received from outside my house were all right and to make sure no cables were broken. As you can guess everything turned out to completely normal according to Infrax. They even told me they had data for the last 2 months and could not see any abnormalities. So I called Telenet again (a couple of times) and now they are putting a special task force on the matter to solve ‘my case’. This task force is specialized in solving the weirdest cases and this appears to be such a case.

Some speed tests:

As you can see here the results got a lot worse in only 7 minutes time. I didn’t turn off my modem or anything so these numbers are measured without me interfering with my own network at all.

Just another proof of my slow internet. I measured about a 100 of these during the last 3 weeks.

Here you see the same problem as discribed above. In 4 minutes my ping rises from 22ms to 2664ms. Only to get back to back to normal values today while writing tis post.

So now my question for you: Does anyone have any idea what could cause this strange problem?

Oh and by the way. By the time I got to the end of this post my internet is back to normal again but that will probably not last for long I guess.