[TriLUG] Request for help: residential internet service provider options.

[Matt Flyer via TriLUG]

> Hi all-
>
> I'm in a monopoly-provider location (Windstream DSL on the Hwy 42-side of
> Harris Lake) and for the past two weeks I've been seeing 20-30% packet
> loss
> (for pings to their DNS server).
I too concur with the suggestion of trying a different DNS server.  It has
been my experience on several occasions that when "internet" service would
go down, what was happening was really a failure to get DNS that once
bypassed would work flawlessly.  The Google DNS is an option and it is
also pretty easy to run a local copy of Bind's resolver as a caching DNS
and point to Google or something other than your ISP as a forwarder.

My second comment is that a ping test can be a poor metric for
performance, especially in times of peak usage such as the afternoon and
evening when you are indicating degraded performance.  Ping, or rather
ICMP in general, tends to be de-prioritized greatly and this may not
accurately reflect your true status.