News and Weather for Dunlap Tennessee
No Repairs Needed
It’s 5 pm and you want to enjoy your broadband to watch a YouTube video. It is not working very well and you call the internet provider. First they tell you it is the street lights or your wireless router. After your local PC repair guy checks it all out and assures you it is not happening you decide it is a random event and dismiss it as a random event . Surely the internet provider would not lie to you.
Does this sound familiar ? It isn’t random, this is the tech worlds way of telling you they don’t know . How can you be sure ? I could tell you how to do a command prompt and trace this problem down but it is not necessary now. You just need to understand a few simple terms like ping , jitter and packet loss .
Ping is the amount of time it takes a piece of information to be sent to a server and come back to you. The lower your ping the better.
Packet loss is how much of the data sent actually arrives. Packet loss should always be zero.
Jitter is how much several ping tests differ or varies. One time you measure the ping and it is 5 milliseconds and the next time it is 500 milliseconds . That would be a huge amount of jitter. Jitter tells you if your connection is stable or not. Lots of on-line tasks require a stable connection to determine how to process your request to watch a video or use an internet phone.
Below are examples of jitter that are unacceptable from an internet provider. You could do better with a dial up connection or carrier pigeon. This has been going on for months usually from 5 pm to about midnight.
I had called several times and I knew they were trying to baffle me with excuses. I can do these tests from a command prompt but could not explain the results. Those pictures are pretty telling . I always say a picture is worth a thousand words.
As for my own internet provider they are working on this only as they get a complaint . Complain and look what happens! This is the greatest connection I have had in a year.
The packet loss is quite alarming and has caused lots of trouble uploading data that ends up corrupted this can be frustrating and costly. I wonder how much people have paid for wireless routers and repairs that were not needed.
