Lousy DSL Service in our neighborhood?

I've been to several houses that have been experiencing "bad" internet response.  I have also experienced that.  In fact, I did some research on the signal and I tried some techniques to make it better.

First, the data:

time	Action	Ping	Jitter	Pkt Loss	IP	up	down
12:18	reset router	31	0	0
12:25	restart ooma	404	144	0
12:26	select new server	390	149	0
12:28	pull plug on Ooma	415	94	0
12:32	ran again	337	94	0
	ooma disconnected for next tests
12:35	reset router	44	25	0	74.248.232.157
12:37	retest	376	65	0
12:38	retest new server	37	1	0	picked same one
12:41	retest	37	1	0
12:42	retest	36	1	0		0.43	6.5
12:44	retest	40	8	0
12:48	retest	37	1	0
	ooma reconnected
12:49	retest	461	65	0
12:50	retest	37	1	0
12:51	retest

 
What does this mean?

The column headings mean:

• time- the time when I ran the test
• Action- what I did before running the test
• Ping- tests the time it takes for a round drip of the signal from my computer to some server on the internet
• Jitter- tests how much noise is on the network- a noisy network means you can't have good audio or video performance (eg Skype or internet based phone- VOIP)
• Pkt loss- tests the number of packets (the fundamental group of bytes of your message transmitted over the internet)
• IP- Address of the computer I am using to receive the test signals
• up- the upload speed in Mbps
• down- the download speed in Mbps

A good signal has numbers similar to the times from 12:38 through 12:48.  A bad signal is like the times from 12:25 to 12:37.

You can see that the signal is unreliable.  I tried disconnection our VOIP machine (OOMA) because our bad phone connection alerted me to the problem.  The tests show that the OOMA machine was not contributing to the noise.

It seems that what worked was to unplug the modem, and router, turn all the equipment off, and then plug in router, then modem, then VOIP machine, then other equipment.  However, as you can see, that did not guarantee a good signal. You can also see that any changes to the network, such as plugging or unplugging equipment, results in a bad network signal for some period of time.

My advice to you is to test your line whenever things seem slow.  You do this by going to two web sites:  http://www.pingtest.net to test the ping, jitter, and package loss, and http://www.speedtest.net to test the upload and download speeds.

Let me know when you get bad results and, if I am on line, I'll run the tests myself to determine if there is an ATT systemic problem.