I just discovered that I got linked from a blog called Stop the Cap which appears to cover internet broadband issue with an editorial position against usage caps. They linked to this blog from a post covering broadband in Lawrence so it is kind of cool that a national blog not related to Jayhawk basketball has discovered our little town!
Anyway, if you are visiting from Stop the Cap, welcome! I started my blog as a way to document a side-by-side comparison my family made of our local cable provider, Sunflower Broadband, with AT&T's VDSL service, U-Verse. The links on the right cover the highlights, but after trying both services, the end result is that we went with AT&T for Internet, and Sunflower for television. Even if you don't live in Lawrence, hopefully my blog will be a good comparison between cable and VDSL for anyone through the country who can choose between the two technologies.
We made the decision in late September, and in the four months since then things have been working out well. We continue to enjoy our Sunflower television service on our TiVo (and on my Mac using a QAM tuner box) and our U-Verse internet has been nearly flawless, with a single pair of glitches over a day in mid November, and other then that no downtime whatsoever with consistent and fast speeds.
Of course there are no use caps on U-Verse in Lawrence. This hasn't turned my family into bandwidth hogs, but it is really nice to be able to veg out to Hulu, utilize online backup services, or download massive software updates and games without worrying about the meter running.
I don't think AT&T is perfect (hey, I have an iPhone too!) but they have been good to have in Lawrence as they have spurred competition. Sunflower has responded by raising their bandwidth caps from 50 GB per month on the Gold plan to a better 120, definitely an improvement for their customers, and hopefully both companies will continue to improve their respective offerings.
Thanks for visiting, and I'll keep writing occasionally about our experiences with broadband here in Lawrence.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
U-Verse reliability update and some cable internet geekery
A couple quick updates...
U-Verse reliability
You might recall that after almost three flawless months, our U-Verse turned to crap in mid-November, going down for four hours on the 17th and having major line noise issues the following night.
We called AT&T for service, and they were unable to find any issue with the line the next day when they were out at our house, although the record from the previous night indicate some line noise. They did do some "wave the dead chicken" troubleshooting by switching our port on the VRAD and providing us with some noise filters for the ethernet cables.
Did those make a difference? It's been almost two weeks since then with no additional downtime. Of course, those two nights could have had nothing to do with us, but rather AT&T head end problems. We know the 4-hour outage was a higher-up issue as U-Verse service thorough the KC region was affected.
Oh well. After three full months of U-Verse, our uptime is at 99.74% (it was 99.99% before the glitches). Sunflower Broadband, for reference was at 99.14% for the first 9 months of 2009.
Cable Bandwidth Meter Geekery
Those of you on Sunflower have bandwidth limits, which you can track using a meter provided by the company. Have you ever wondered how the meter works or how accurate it is? Comcast, which is experimenting with similar metering, commission an audit of its meters by a third party, which can be read right here.
The summary? The Comcast meter is accurate within about 1% of actual use. FWIW, I don't know if Sunflower's meter uses the same technology as Comcast.
As an aside, one of the major problems with meters is that there's no real-time way to know if you (or something on your network you don't know about) is sucking down the bits. Sunflower has improved their meter to the point where it shows hour-by-hour usage, which helps somewhat, but what is really needed is a real-time "tachometer" to see the actual bandwidth. This probably needs to be built-in to the router or cable modem. Ironically, U-Verse's home gateway includes a built-in meter exactly like this...I say ironically because U-Verse doesn't cap bandwidth, so the meter is informational only, although still quite useful for figuring out of someone in my household is killing our connection by hogging the pipe. If you have U-Verse you can see the meter at http://192.168.1.254/xslt?PAGE=M01
U-Verse reliability
You might recall that after almost three flawless months, our U-Verse turned to crap in mid-November, going down for four hours on the 17th and having major line noise issues the following night.
We called AT&T for service, and they were unable to find any issue with the line the next day when they were out at our house, although the record from the previous night indicate some line noise. They did do some "wave the dead chicken" troubleshooting by switching our port on the VRAD and providing us with some noise filters for the ethernet cables.
Did those make a difference? It's been almost two weeks since then with no additional downtime. Of course, those two nights could have had nothing to do with us, but rather AT&T head end problems. We know the 4-hour outage was a higher-up issue as U-Verse service thorough the KC region was affected.
Oh well. After three full months of U-Verse, our uptime is at 99.74% (it was 99.99% before the glitches). Sunflower Broadband, for reference was at 99.14% for the first 9 months of 2009.
Cable Bandwidth Meter Geekery
Those of you on Sunflower have bandwidth limits, which you can track using a meter provided by the company. Have you ever wondered how the meter works or how accurate it is? Comcast, which is experimenting with similar metering, commission an audit of its meters by a third party, which can be read right here.
The summary? The Comcast meter is accurate within about 1% of actual use. FWIW, I don't know if Sunflower's meter uses the same technology as Comcast.
As an aside, one of the major problems with meters is that there's no real-time way to know if you (or something on your network you don't know about) is sucking down the bits. Sunflower has improved their meter to the point where it shows hour-by-hour usage, which helps somewhat, but what is really needed is a real-time "tachometer" to see the actual bandwidth. This probably needs to be built-in to the router or cable modem. Ironically, U-Verse's home gateway includes a built-in meter exactly like this...I say ironically because U-Verse doesn't cap bandwidth, so the meter is informational only, although still quite useful for figuring out of someone in my household is killing our connection by hogging the pipe. If you have U-Verse you can see the meter at http://192.168.1.254/xslt?PAGE=M01
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
A couple quick updates
U-Verse Internet
After over 10 weeks of uptime, our U-Verse connection suffered it's first extended outage last night, going down for about 4 hours between 11:45 PM and 3:45 AM. The actual DSL link stayed up, but there was no internet access - i.e. the lights were on but nobody was home!
My guess is that there was an equipment outage in AT&T's "head end" rather then any problem with the DSL line itself. Either way, the result was the same, 4 hours downtime.
This knocks our overall uptime since we got U-Verse down to 99.70% (from 99.99%) which is still better (so far) then our average uptime with Sunflower Broadband, which was 99.14%. This U-Verse downtime better not become a habit. I'm cutting them some slack since everyone gets a freebie, but yeah, I'm not quite as enthusiastic as I was a day ago.
As an aside, as part of my troubleshooting when the net went down, I rebooted the home gateway. It made no difference for the main issue, but it did end up fixing a nagging problem I recently discovered where the home gateway wasn't fully opening up mapped ports through the firewall. It would kind of "half open" them in a weird way. The reboot fixed that. The router had been up for two months prior, which for a consumer router, is probably simply too long to remain running reliably without a power cycle.
Sunflower Broadband cable TV
Sunflower Broadband just announced a new multi-room DVR which is very similar to what we tried with U-Verse TV. As I mentioned in my TV overview, U-Verse has a multi-room DVR where you can watch recorded shows in any room and pause a show in one room and pick it up in the other. Sunflower is offering this as an "add on" to the existing TV service for an addition $25 per month (for two rooms) which makes their price (with this service) about the same as U-Verse.
For the technically curious, Sunflower is using Pace's multi-room DVR for this, and is actually one of the first companies in the United States offering the service. Pace's system works over ethernet or coaxial cable, and is similar to U-Verse in that there is a main unit with a hard drive acting as a network-attached storage device serving the other set-top boxes. The UI (at least for the Sunflower version of the box) is similar to their existing HD i-Guide, in other words, it's not going to put TiVo's UI designers out of business any time soon! Engadget has more details about the system's tech specs.
We're still satisfied with our TiVo, but having a multi-room option on both cable and U-Verse to choose from is certainly a good thing.
After over 10 weeks of uptime, our U-Verse connection suffered it's first extended outage last night, going down for about 4 hours between 11:45 PM and 3:45 AM. The actual DSL link stayed up, but there was no internet access - i.e. the lights were on but nobody was home!
My guess is that there was an equipment outage in AT&T's "head end" rather then any problem with the DSL line itself. Either way, the result was the same, 4 hours downtime.
This knocks our overall uptime since we got U-Verse down to 99.70% (from 99.99%) which is still better (so far) then our average uptime with Sunflower Broadband, which was 99.14%. This U-Verse downtime better not become a habit. I'm cutting them some slack since everyone gets a freebie, but yeah, I'm not quite as enthusiastic as I was a day ago.
As an aside, as part of my troubleshooting when the net went down, I rebooted the home gateway. It made no difference for the main issue, but it did end up fixing a nagging problem I recently discovered where the home gateway wasn't fully opening up mapped ports through the firewall. It would kind of "half open" them in a weird way. The reboot fixed that. The router had been up for two months prior, which for a consumer router, is probably simply too long to remain running reliably without a power cycle.
Sunflower Broadband cable TV
Sunflower Broadband just announced a new multi-room DVR which is very similar to what we tried with U-Verse TV. As I mentioned in my TV overview, U-Verse has a multi-room DVR where you can watch recorded shows in any room and pause a show in one room and pick it up in the other. Sunflower is offering this as an "add on" to the existing TV service for an addition $25 per month (for two rooms) which makes their price (with this service) about the same as U-Verse.
For the technically curious, Sunflower is using Pace's multi-room DVR for this, and is actually one of the first companies in the United States offering the service. Pace's system works over ethernet or coaxial cable, and is similar to U-Verse in that there is a main unit with a hard drive acting as a network-attached storage device serving the other set-top boxes. The UI (at least for the Sunflower version of the box) is similar to their existing HD i-Guide, in other words, it's not going to put TiVo's UI designers out of business any time soon! Engadget has more details about the system's tech specs.
We're still satisfied with our TiVo, but having a multi-room option on both cable and U-Verse to choose from is certainly a good thing.
Monday, October 26, 2009
U-Verse internet update . . . 46 days and counting
Our U-Verse internet has been up now for 46 days without a single glitch. No downtime, and no noticeable or sustained dips in speed or ping time. I am probably jinxing myself, but I find this absolutely amazing. I guess I shouldn't find this too stunning (wait, you mean we're actually getting the service for which we paid?!?) but in over 10 years of service with Sunflower, we never went for longer then 7-10 days at a time without some downtime (if even for a few minutes), and frequently the outages and slowdowns were much worse.
I'd actually be interested in know why this is so, from a technical standpoint. I would think coaxial cable would be more reliable then copper, but perhaps it has to do more with the network management rather then the medium. Alas, it is a mystery.
Now, if the AT&T folks who run the U-Verse network could only give the guys who run their cellular data networks a few clues...
I'd actually be interested in know why this is so, from a technical standpoint. I would think coaxial cable would be more reliable then copper, but perhaps it has to do more with the network management rather then the medium. Alas, it is a mystery.
Now, if the AT&T folks who run the U-Verse network could only give the guys who run their cellular data networks a few clues...
Monday, October 5, 2009
U-Verse Internet caveats
Our U-Verse internet has continued to be rock-solid (keeping fingers crossed) but during the month we've used it so far, there have been a few minor issues we have come across, which I will document here for Google and posterity. Two of these have easy workarounds, and the other two will not really matter to most people, but might to you, if you are a special flower....so read on....
First, the two issues that have workarounds:
1. The U-Verse gateway's DNS doesn't like Apple computers.
The workaround for this is easy. If you use a Mac, simply set your DNS to use OpenDNS (or if you have a bunch of Macs, you can do this in the router)
2. U-Verse's head end blocks outbound traffic on port 25 for non AT&T email accounts.
This is the port that is used by most mail programs when they send outbound email. This isn't something you can change locally in your router, but luckily AT&T will unblock it if you ask them. We were able to get this done in 5 minutes via their online chat support, but other people have had to call in to tier 2 technical support.
And second, the two issues which might be deal-killers for some folks:
3. U-Verse utilizes interleaving for their data transmission.
Interleaving is a method of transmitting data in non-sequential chunks to increase overall performance. This is good for things like TV, but it has a side-effect with internet...slightly longer ping times, up to 20 milliseconds or more. This doesn't matter to most people....unless you are an online gamer. Online gaming relies on very fast response times from the servers, and the added overhead of U-Verse's interleaving may degrade game performance in some games. This isn't a "100% for sure" thing...it depends on the game and the server, but it is certainly something that should be at "yellow alert" for any gamers considering U-Verse. Take advantage of the 1-month free trial and test with all your favorite games.
4. There's no way to get pure unrouted internet access to a local device.
U-Verse allows you to set up a DMZ, which for an individual PC will allow in all internet traffic. This is considered dangerous and only experienced folks who know what they are doing should use the DMZ. However, some physical devices, such as hardware VPN routers and firewalls do not like being in a DMZ; they prefer pure, unrouted "raw" public connections to the internet. U-Verse's residential gateway cannot be placed into the "bridge" mode that is required to do this, so if you need this functionality, make sure you test your devices with U-Verse during the free trial period to make sure they work.
First, the two issues that have workarounds:
1. The U-Verse gateway's DNS doesn't like Apple computers.
The workaround for this is easy. If you use a Mac, simply set your DNS to use OpenDNS (or if you have a bunch of Macs, you can do this in the router)
2. U-Verse's head end blocks outbound traffic on port 25 for non AT&T email accounts.
This is the port that is used by most mail programs when they send outbound email. This isn't something you can change locally in your router, but luckily AT&T will unblock it if you ask them. We were able to get this done in 5 minutes via their online chat support, but other people have had to call in to tier 2 technical support.
And second, the two issues which might be deal-killers for some folks:
3. U-Verse utilizes interleaving for their data transmission.
Interleaving is a method of transmitting data in non-sequential chunks to increase overall performance. This is good for things like TV, but it has a side-effect with internet...slightly longer ping times, up to 20 milliseconds or more. This doesn't matter to most people....unless you are an online gamer. Online gaming relies on very fast response times from the servers, and the added overhead of U-Verse's interleaving may degrade game performance in some games. This isn't a "100% for sure" thing...it depends on the game and the server, but it is certainly something that should be at "yellow alert" for any gamers considering U-Verse. Take advantage of the 1-month free trial and test with all your favorite games.
4. There's no way to get pure unrouted internet access to a local device.
U-Verse allows you to set up a DMZ, which for an individual PC will allow in all internet traffic. This is considered dangerous and only experienced folks who know what they are doing should use the DMZ. However, some physical devices, such as hardware VPN routers and firewalls do not like being in a DMZ; they prefer pure, unrouted "raw" public connections to the internet. U-Verse's residential gateway cannot be placed into the "bridge" mode that is required to do this, so if you need this functionality, make sure you test your devices with U-Verse during the free trial period to make sure they work.
U-Verse TV parting shot and wireless gateway weirdness
As I mentioned last week, we decided to go with Sunflower Broadband for television, keeping U-Verse for internet. This weekend, I disconnected the U-Verse set-top boxes in preparation for shipping them back to AT&T (this shipping is handled by the UPS store; AT&T has an account with them, so we just drop the boxes off there).
This gave me the chance to snap a couple extra pictures of various aspects I hadn't mentioned before. Specifically, you can now get a good view of the various ports on the back of the unit as well as seeing how the two units stack up right next to each other. (the smaller box is the secondary unit, sans DVR hard drive.)
Interestingly enough, once AT&T shuts off television service to your home (which they do remotely), you can't even use the DVR to watch previously-recorded shows. This is different then other devices like the TiVo, which allows you to watch shows previously recorded even if you no longer are paying for service.
Wireless weirdness
Last Thursday night, our U-Verse residential gateway's (RG's) wireless interface failed. Basically, it was randomly dropping connected wifi devices, and if you tried to connect a new device, sometimes it would connect, and sometimes it would not connect. Even if it connected, it would drop after a few minutes, or the DHCP server wouldn't assign an IP address to the wifi client. I determined that this was not any type of new interference or signal issue. My solution was simply cycling wifi off and turning it back on from the RG's admin interface, after which everything went back to working properly.
Needless to say, this glitch didn't fill me with confidence as to the robustness of the residential gateway. In comparison, our previous wireless router, an Apple Airport Extreme, ran uninterrupted for over a year without any glitches like this. I should also note that the DSL signal (i.e. internet connection) was fine through this entire episode. The problem is local on the gateway itself, not the upstream connection.
Although the RG allowed wireless to be reset without requiring a full reboot of the entire RG, we noticed later when we tried to watch a television show that was recorded during this time period that it was blocky, pixellated, and skipped a lot, indicating that the RG was really having some issues. We had already decided at this point to drop the U-Verse TV service, but this certainly reinforced our decision.
As of now, the RG has been performing fine, both wired and wireless since then. I will certainly be keeping an eye on things though. File this under "reliability, long term, questions of."
This gave me the chance to snap a couple extra pictures of various aspects I hadn't mentioned before. Specifically, you can now get a good view of the various ports on the back of the unit as well as seeing how the two units stack up right next to each other. (the smaller box is the secondary unit, sans DVR hard drive.)
Interestingly enough, once AT&T shuts off television service to your home (which they do remotely), you can't even use the DVR to watch previously-recorded shows. This is different then other devices like the TiVo, which allows you to watch shows previously recorded even if you no longer are paying for service.
Wireless weirdness
Last Thursday night, our U-Verse residential gateway's (RG's) wireless interface failed. Basically, it was randomly dropping connected wifi devices, and if you tried to connect a new device, sometimes it would connect, and sometimes it would not connect. Even if it connected, it would drop after a few minutes, or the DHCP server wouldn't assign an IP address to the wifi client. I determined that this was not any type of new interference or signal issue. My solution was simply cycling wifi off and turning it back on from the RG's admin interface, after which everything went back to working properly.
Needless to say, this glitch didn't fill me with confidence as to the robustness of the residential gateway. In comparison, our previous wireless router, an Apple Airport Extreme, ran uninterrupted for over a year without any glitches like this. I should also note that the DSL signal (i.e. internet connection) was fine through this entire episode. The problem is local on the gateway itself, not the upstream connection.
Although the RG allowed wireless to be reset without requiring a full reboot of the entire RG, we noticed later when we tried to watch a television show that was recorded during this time period that it was blocky, pixellated, and skipped a lot, indicating that the RG was really having some issues. We had already decided at this point to drop the U-Verse TV service, but this certainly reinforced our decision.
As of now, the RG has been performing fine, both wired and wireless since then. I will certainly be keeping an eye on things though. File this under "reliability, long term, questions of."
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sunflower Broadband Gold Internet to receive upgrade
Mere days after we decided to go with U-Verse for our internet needs, we (as well as presumably every subscriber in Lawrence) got a letter from Sunflower Broadband detailing upgrades to their top-of-the-line Gold Internet package, starting November 1 (the news about the upgrade still isn't on Sunflower's web site as of this writing). This is the very package we recently subscribed to that we switched from to U-Verse. Does the new plan give us some serious "buyers remorse?"
Let's take a comparison:
So, to summarize, for an extra $10 per month, Sunflower Gold customers will get over twice the download speed and bandwidth, and a very slight boost in upload speed. Not mentioned in the letter is the technology which make's Sunflower's upgrade possible, DOCSIS 3.0, which promises, as one of its features, better management ability of the data streams, which will hopefully end the evening congestion and slowdowns that have frustrated many cable modem customers. The faster download speed should be really nice for downloading huge files, such as operating systems and online movies and television. While many users won't see the theoretical maximum connecting to public sites on the internet, the fact that these speeds are starting to become available to home users is a great sign for the future. This is a solid upgrade and I congratulate Sunflower for bringing DOCSIS 3.0 technology to Lawrence.
While a good value for the extra $10, it isn't quite enough to win us back for now. I am disappointed to see the upload speed of the upgraded Gold plan is still an anemic 1 mbit, which is 50% less the our U-Verse connection and barely any better then the old Gold plan. Given how much upload speed matters for common tasks like uploading home photos and movies to online sharing sites, as well as file sharing and connecting to corporate VPNs, the almost unchanged upload speed isn't very impressive.
The increased bandwidth is very nice, and would make us worry less about unexpected overages, but it falls short of U-Verse's unlimited bandwidth, as well as continuing to be somewhat less then other cable providers such as Comcast which caps bandwidth at 250 gigabytes. Sunflower does offer a bandwidth-unlimited service called Palladium as an alternative, but variable download speeds and a still-slow upload don't make this an attractive option compared to U-Verse for now.
Sunflower's upgrades are good news for customers and makes the Internet choice closer then it was 24 hours ago. In the past, Sunflower has often "tweaked" their offerings, and if they bump the new Gold upload speeds up a megabit or so and continue to adjust their bandwidth limits higher, they have a good shot at winning our business back yet. For now though, we will still stick with U-Verse as long as its price and reliability continue unchanged.
Let's take a comparison:
| Existing Gold | Upgraded Gold | U-Verse Max 18 | |
| Download | 21 mbit | 50 mbit | 18 mbit |
| Upload | .75 mbit | 1 mbit | 1.5 mbit |
| Bandwidth cap | 50 GB | 120 GB | unlimited |
| Price | $50 | $60 | $65 |
So, to summarize, for an extra $10 per month, Sunflower Gold customers will get over twice the download speed and bandwidth, and a very slight boost in upload speed. Not mentioned in the letter is the technology which make's Sunflower's upgrade possible, DOCSIS 3.0, which promises, as one of its features, better management ability of the data streams, which will hopefully end the evening congestion and slowdowns that have frustrated many cable modem customers. The faster download speed should be really nice for downloading huge files, such as operating systems and online movies and television. While many users won't see the theoretical maximum connecting to public sites on the internet, the fact that these speeds are starting to become available to home users is a great sign for the future. This is a solid upgrade and I congratulate Sunflower for bringing DOCSIS 3.0 technology to Lawrence.
While a good value for the extra $10, it isn't quite enough to win us back for now. I am disappointed to see the upload speed of the upgraded Gold plan is still an anemic 1 mbit, which is 50% less the our U-Verse connection and barely any better then the old Gold plan. Given how much upload speed matters for common tasks like uploading home photos and movies to online sharing sites, as well as file sharing and connecting to corporate VPNs, the almost unchanged upload speed isn't very impressive.
The increased bandwidth is very nice, and would make us worry less about unexpected overages, but it falls short of U-Verse's unlimited bandwidth, as well as continuing to be somewhat less then other cable providers such as Comcast which caps bandwidth at 250 gigabytes. Sunflower does offer a bandwidth-unlimited service called Palladium as an alternative, but variable download speeds and a still-slow upload don't make this an attractive option compared to U-Verse for now.
Sunflower's upgrades are good news for customers and makes the Internet choice closer then it was 24 hours ago. In the past, Sunflower has often "tweaked" their offerings, and if they bump the new Gold upload speeds up a megabit or so and continue to adjust their bandwidth limits higher, they have a good shot at winning our business back yet. For now though, we will still stick with U-Verse as long as its price and reliability continue unchanged.
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