My home network

June 1, 2013

For over ten years I had DSL from Century-Link (Qwest), but in July of 2013 I switched to cable when Century Link was unable and unwilling to fix intermittent problems with my connection.

My home DSL Modem 2001 to 2010

My home internet connection has (over the 10 years from 2001 to 2010) been a 1.5M/256k link handled by a Cisco 678 modem. This modem has given me no troubles and is still going strong in July of 2010. This speed has been entirely adequate for all that I have wanted to do, my only complaint has been that connections "lock up" and/or get dropped now and then for no apparent reason.

My home DSL Modem 2010 to present (2013)

In 2010 I moved to a new home and as part of the move upgraded to a 7M/896k link.

Qwest (now Century Link or whatever) either lied to me, or was clueless -- a distinction that is hard to make and equally frustrating. They told me the Cisco 678 would work at my new location. This was not true. The Cisco 678 won't handle the protcol involved with the new link (which is apparently ADSL2+ rather than vanilla ADSL).

This required me to invest in a new modem -- an Actiontec PK5000 at the cost of roughly $70. There are suggestions that I can put the 678 into "Bridge" mode rather than PPP mode and use it by connecting it to a PPPoE capable router, but I don't have the time or energy to fiddle with that. The Actiontec includes a builtin 802.11g wireless access point and a 4 port ethernet switch. It also runs embedded linux (and allows ssh access), so there would seem to be no limit to what a person with linux skills could do with this device. Initially I was unhappy with it, but I have actually grown to like it.

Here are some links:

Time for an update. It is May of 2013 and I have been here for about 3 years with Century Link DSL and the Actiontek. The Actiontek keeps on going -- every once in a while I have needed to reboot it by power cycling, but this is required maybe twice a year. What is an issue is that Century Link suffers from a variety of problems. Sometimes their DNS servers get haywire (and provide me with some stupid web page when they cannot resolve my request). Sometimes their equipment just stops working for hours on end (This happened for about 2 hours mid-day of May 9, 2013). Fairly frequently, and annoyingly they drop my ssh connections. This particularly irritates me when I am in the midst of editing some file on one of the servers I maintain.

The phone number to Century Link DSL support is 1-877-348-9005.

Visit number 1 (5-2013)

The repair tech came out, was really a nice guy, and almost immediately figured out what was up. Inside my hookup box are some surge protectors (things that Century Link maintains), and he quickly verified that mine had degraded and needed to be replaced. He said that on a line with voice along with DSL, I would have been complaining some time ago. After this fix, my connection has been solid for a good 8 hours now, and I am waiting to see if my connection renegotiates to the 7M I am paying for (right now it reports 3072/879). Incidently he said that he thought the Actiontek PK5000 modem was a decent piece of gear.

Visit number 2 (5-2013)

Things were OK for a while, then I started having serious trouble again. I got on the phone right away and a different tech came out. The guys in the field seem to really know their stuff. This guy replaced more stuff in my hookup box, then went out to the box near the street (which was buried under a foot of dirt and gravel) and discovered a second connection to my line there. He cut this and the signal levels came up to levels he liked a lot better. After this things were better ... for about a week.

Overhaul my wiring (6-7-2013)

Before I called them for another visit, I wanted to take action on some aspects of my house wiring. The last tech that came out said that it would be great to use Cat-5 wire for the run (of about 15 feet) between their box outside and my DSL modem in the house. He said to use the black and yellow pair, and don't worry about polarity. I have a whole box of discared Cat-5 cable, so why not do it right.

We start off right away with screwy information, there ain't no black and yellow pair. The pairs are solid and striped, and there are 4 pairs to choose from.

I verified that only the center red and green wires are needed in the "phone patch" cable that runs from my wall jack to my modem. I verified this by installing a patch cable that has only these 2 wires and checking that my DSL connection (which happened to be in a good mood at the time) still worked. Good engineering practices would dictate keeping the Cat-5 cable for as much of the distance as possible right up to the modem and using as short a piece of phone cable as possible.

So, what I did was to chop off 3 inches from a phone cord in decent condition. The I took the center red and green wires and picked a pair from my Cat-5 cable to solder them to. I used the blue pair, since I like blue. I insulated this with a couple of layers of heat shrink tubing and pulled this through the wall and hooked it up to the phone box outside. This gives me a single pair of Cat-5 for as much of the distance as I can manage. I finished this repair at 5PM Friday 6-7-2013. It is working great so far.

Visits numbers 3 and 4 (6-12-2013)

I called 6-10-2013 after 20 minutes of no connectivity (starting at 11 AM and finally ending at 11:46). This call and the one before have been to a call center in "Asia" with people who are trained to ask certain likely questions (do you have filters on the line? do you have an alarm system? are you using wireless? how many phone jacks? etc. etc.). I tell them I have a 20 foot section of Cat-5 cable directly from the box outside to the DSL modem, but this means nothing to them. Finally they schedule another visit for two days later between 8AM and 12.

Two days later I wait patiently, then at 1PM call to say "where the heck is the tech". Apparently my ticket is closed. The guy came and measured levels he felt were proper at the box and drove off without any communication with me. Now I am upset and have to waste another 20 minutes on the phone with a droid in India somewhere to schedule another visit two days later. This visit also gets cancelled (with my agreement). The tech called late in the day and was on the other side of town and my link was working at the time so I didn't expect a visit to be productive.

What I am seeing

Here are some statistics of what I am seeing:

Thu May 30 --> 0.0 (0.0) minutes lost, 0.0 minutes slow
Fri May 31 --> 2.3 (2.3) minutes lost, 0.0 minutes slow
Sat Jun 1 --> 820.0 (855.0) minutes lost, 17.0 minutes slow
Sun Jun 2 --> 55.5 (97.2) minutes lost, 31.2 minutes slow
Mon Jun 3 --> 27.6 (47.2) minutes lost, 4.6 minutes slow
Tue Jun 4 --> 62.4 (101.7) minutes lost, 612.5 minutes slow
Wed Jun 5 --> 63.6 (95.9) minutes lost, 766.2 minutes slow
Thu Jun 6 --> 51.8 (96.8) minutes lost, 95.6 minutes slow
Fri Jun 7 --> 120.0 (178.8) minutes lost, 496.2 minutes slow
Sat Jun 8 --> 70.3 (126.8) minutes lost, 18.4 minutes slow
Sun Jun 9 --> 25.3 (46.0) minutes lost, 0.0 minutes slow
Mon Jun 10 --> 65.7 (99.2) minutes lost, 12.7 minutes slow
Tue Jun 11 --> 38.0 (56.4) minutes lost, 194.4 minutes slow
Wed Jun 12 --> 389.9 (426.4) minutes lost, 213.2 minutes slow
Thu Jun 13 --> 31.0 (55.0) minutes lost, 26.0 minutes slow

I give two values for time lost. The first is simply when the modem does not report a CONNECTED status for both DSL and internet. The second adds on any uselessly short times (less than 5 minutes) when I have an unstable connection that is coming and going. The time I record as slow are when the modem says I am connected, but is reporting a speed less than I should be getting. I should get a 7168 Kbps download speed. I call anything less than 6500 slow.

Try a new modem - 7/9/2013

On Tuesday July 9, 2013 I configured and installed the new PK5000 that I bought on Ebay. It seems to work just fine and right away connects at full speed. The wireless works too. We will see after a week or so if this solves anything.

Where we stand right now

I am trying to be a squeaky wheel with Century Link and see where it gets me. It actually doesn't seem to get me very far, but here is what I have learned.

If you call their support number, you end up talking to somebody overseas. I suspect India, but who knows for sure. I am told that you can insist on talking to a native speaker or someone in the USA, but I haven't been that pushy. The online support people can apparently do some kind of online checking, but what they really do is try to run you through a bunch of routine troubleshooting. However, the only way to get a tech dispatched to your house is to go through this system as they have to validate your identity.
I found that the guys that actually show up at your house are pretty knowledgeable and generally very helpful. But there are limits as to what they can do. Even though I actually wanted them to check my house wiring, the past two times I set up a visit and waited at home for hours, they came and went without contacting me, and apparently just connected their meter to the outside line and decided the signal levels looked OK.
The people you contact via their online email are pretty capable also, but they cannot dispatch a person to your house, and ultimately they never actually did anything for me.

I have given up hope on Century Link actually fixing anything and am waiting to see if my new modem does the trick. I am also waiting for a promotion from Cox cable that includes free installation and I will give them a try then if Century Link has not fixed my issues by then.

What about my modem

I am using the Actiontec PK5000 DLS modem. This is not to be confused with an entirely different PK5000Z made by Zytec or some such company. I am told the Zytec version is something to avoid. I have actually grown to like my PK5000, although everyone seems to agree that its wireless is not very good. I purchased a second PK5000 on Ebay for $17 including shipping, and have just tried swapping it. Another modem I might try is the Motorola 3347. There seem to be 3 flavors of DSL in use these days. There is ADSL, ADSL2+, and VDSL. (There is also something called GPON that allows outrageous speeds). For my 7 Mb connection, I need ADSL2+. I think VDSL uses fiber.

Century Link Modem compatibility table

My monitoring script

I wrote a program in ruby that gets information from the Actiontec web interface. I collect a variety of pieces of information and log it to a file every ten seconds. This gives me a history of what is going on with my connection. I run it on my linux system at home and offer it here for anyone who might find it useful or interesting:

My modem probing script

Some sample output follows:

Wed May 29 13:57:36 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:19M:03S (67.1.97.106) 2656/192 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:57:49 MST 2013 CONNECTING NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:00 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 7168/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:12 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 7168/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:23 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 7168/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:34 MST 2013 CONNECTED NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:45 MST 2013 NOT CONNECTED NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 6336/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:58:58 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:59:09 MST 2013 CONNECTING NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:59:20 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 6880/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:59:32 MST 2013 NOT CONNECTED NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:59:43 MST 2013 CONNECTING NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 6176/736 Kbps
Wed May 29 13:59:54 MST 2013 CONNECTED NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:00:05 MST 2013 NOT CONNECTED NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 7072/896 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:00:18 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:00:29 MST 2013 CONNECTING NOT CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 0/0 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:00:40 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTING 0 Day, 00H:00M:00S (N/A) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:00:52 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:05S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:01:04 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:17S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:01:15 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:28S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:01:28 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:39S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:01:39 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:00M:52S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps
Wed May 29 14:01:50 MST 2013 CONNECTED CONNECTED 0 Day, 00H:01M:03S (67.1.105.14) 6304/608 Kbps

The above 4 minute section of log captures a connection being lost and then reacquired. This was before the latest round of repair work. Notice that the outside world IP number is logged along with my downstream and upstream speeds (which in this case are not yet what they should be).

Fix the idle ssh connection getting dropped

I still see idle ssh connections getting dropped, but there may be ways to fix this. A google search shows that this is a well known issue.

My notes on SSH connection over DSL getting dropped

Indeed adjusting the TCP keepalive parameter on my system seemed to rememdy most of the SSH connection dropped issues. I then called Century Link again to ask about the 3072/879 and they did something on their end and the modem now detects 7168/879 and their speed test shows I am getting 6123/715, which the guy on the phone says is correct (within the expected range I presume) for the 7M link I am paying for. All better. Their speed test is one of the first links on:

Century Link Internet Help

Wireless at home

I have invested almost zero time and energy in my home wireless setup. This may change as I am interested in the concept of setting up a second wireless access point as a bridge to get a better wireless signal in some areas around my house.

dd-wrt

The last straw with Century Link

On July 31, 2013 I called them to say that I had ordered cable service and wanted to discontinue my service. I was transfered to their "disconnect handler", who was a person who was clearly given the job of keeping me if at all possible. He offered me perpetual half-price service, told me he could get me connected to on-shore tech support people. Many thing I might have wanted (I used the phrase "zombies in India", which got his attention and did not seem to offend him). Too little too late, but I did agree to let them suspend my service while I check out cable. If cable sucks maybe I will go back and see if the half price service offer is still available.

One thing I see with this company is that nobody is empowered to do whatever it takes to fix my problem. Each person deals with their tiny realm and their hands are tied beyond a certain point. Perhaps a good strategy would have been when I had met one of the guys in the trucks and gotten their name and specific phone number to work with them as long as possible. Who knows.

I don't want cheaper internet, or even faster internet. I just want internet that is there reliably, not 20 hours out of a 24 hour day. Imagine picking up the phone and having the line dead for an hour or so every afternoon or evening!

Will Cox be better?

We are going to see:

My switch to Cox Cable

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org