[NBLUG/talk] Comcast slow downs

[Dave Sisley]

Dustin Mollo wrote:
> i think it indicates that ubuntu released the first beta of karmic
> koala at the end of last week and all the main mirrors have been
> slammed.
>
> -dustin
>
> On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Roger House <rhouse at sonic.net> wrote:
>   
>> A new wrinkle:  This weekend whenever I downloaded an Ubuntu update or used
>> Synaptic to download a package, the download went at a crawl, often 1Kbps.
>> While
>> this was going on, I tried speedtest.net several times and it reported that
>> my download
>> speed was anywhere from 4 to 6 Mbps.  Does this indicate that Comcast is
>> throttling
>> the sites being used by these Ubuntu downloads?
>>
>> Roger
>>
>>     
I think that this is not related to Comcast:  I use Sonic DSL and I've 
experienced trouble updating a Laptop I have with 9.04 on it.  The 
update had about 21 packages, a half dozen of which were OpenOffice 
packages.  So I'd call it a fairly large update (not really sure what 
the actual size was).

Just to really confuse things, updating the laptop over wifi seems to 
kill the connection.  I tried a half dozen times to update it before I 
finally just brought the thing into the office where I could hook it to 
the router with an ethernet cable just to get it done.

What's really annoying is that my problem could be the result of:

    * bad wifi driver issues (i've tried 3 different wifi adapters for
      this laptop, and while the latest seems to work pretty well, it
      crapped out during this update)
    * me insisting on trying to maintain a wifi connection in the
      garage, far from the wifi router
    * something wrong with Ubuntu's update process (some googling seems
      to hint at this - other people have reported dropped wifi
      connections during apt-get updates)

I'm not trying to hijack the thread here - my work around is fine for 
periodic updates.   Thanks to Dustin for pointing out that Karmic 
related traffic might be at work here.  You need to try some non-Ubuntu 
related test, perhaps.

And I know this is obvious, but I'd recommend Sonic if you can get their 
dsl to your house.  Comcast sounds like the devil.

-dave.

-- 
Dave Sisley
dsisley at sonic.net
roth-sisley.net