Severe intermittent issues with Charter/Spectrum

[criscofats]

Hi all,

 

I've been having some pretty severe connection speed issues lately with Charter/Spectrum in the Saint Louis area (see my results for example).  I noticed it start back in September when regular images and gifs would take anywhere from a few seconds to over a minute to load.  I'm currently on a 100/5 plan, and everything was fine prior to that, but am seeing speeds dip down to 500Kbps or lower in regular intervals.

 

I've been capturing a lot of wireshark data and running a lot of autotests and it appears that the issue is just getting worse.  Wireshark is showing a ton of TCP retransmit and TCP DUP ACK errors when I encounter the slow speeds.  I tested my connection plugged directly into my modem and while connected to my router.  My PC is hardwired using CAT6.

 

Everything is fine as long as I stay within the Charter network, I can stream YouTube videos, Netflix, Google music etc. but all of those services appear to terminate within a data center that is fairly local to me according to some trace routes and WinMTR.

 

However, if I need to download something like a Linux ISO, or a large firmware update that has to travel outside of Charter's territory, I'm hit with extremely slow speeds, in the range of 500Kbps, causing downloads to take an obscenely long time.

 

I've been fighting with Charter support for a bit over 2 months now at this point, they've sent multiple techs out to verify the hardware and everything checks out (Lines, modem, termination box).  I'm convinced that there is a logical routing issue or BGP issue somewhere down the line but I am unable to get solid evidence or get in touch with a network engineer on their side.

 

I wanted to see if I could be missing something here on my end or if anyone has experienced a similar issue and was able to get it resolved?

 

Let me know if I need to provide more information and I would be happy to.

[Pgoodwin1]

I’m with Spectrum in Cincinnati and don’t have any issues

[David B]

Spectrum in Maine.  I'm having the same issues.  So is my daughter ten miles away.

[criscofats]

Hi David,

 

I actually ended up having my issue resolved after a lot of time.  I ended up getting one of the local tech supervisors to come out to my house and they placed a call to "a guy they know" that worked in a different department/area.  We were able to do some extensive testing and discovered there was an issue in their Chicago data center with a load balancer.  I don't know if it was due to faulty hardware or a bad config loaded onto the load balancer, but once they 'fixed' it I have not had issues.