As a couple of you on here already know, my Internet connection has basically been falling apart. Around three or so months ago, I began to notice my speeds were becoming a bit questionably slow- I voiced my opinion to my family occasionally and thought no more of it afterwards. A month goes by, and suddenly I notice that I can barely play TF2 anymore, and Steam became much more network hogging than I remembered. As in, when I was connected to Steam, the Internet was considerably slower than I remembered. After closing Steam and running a speedtest, I noticed that even with Steam closed, router reset, and no family phones connected to our network, we still were much slower than we usually were. I, once again, told my family and I even called Internet America to see if there was something going on at their end that was the problem.
After talking for a bit, this guy makes me use a speed test, though this one is one they keep on their website. When talking to him, I miraculously got speeds faster than I ever remembered getting. He tells me that we seem fine, and the call ends shortly after. Later, I run the same speed test, and I get results around 20% of the speeds I was just getting while on the line with him. My mom, not knowing I'd called this guy, calls him after
she notices something's wrong. He decides to send a tech guy over to check on our wires and dish and the likes.
The guy gets here, immediately swaps out some wires with fresh ones. He tells us that our neighbor's recent dish upgrade is basically acting as a vacuum for our service, and he relocates our dish to the other side of our house, saying that this way their dish isn't blocking ours. Seriously, our neighbor just got a giant dish, so we all guessed that that would surely fix it. He runs a few speed tests, shows us that we're getting faster than before speeds again. He leaves, and our Internet did seem improved, though still really slow. I no longer could play TF2, and I had to tell naturemon to pop me out of the BLF HL team roster, for the sake of the team. CS:S also became a no-go. Garry's Mod became unplayable online.
Fast forward a bit, my Internet's doing better, but still, it's obvious there's something wrong. The IT people know my mom's name by now, and they openly tell her they have "no idea what's wrong here, but something is definitely not right and we're looking into it further." This goes on for about two weeks. They eventually tell her "You should run the speed tester on our site, it sends us statistics about your connection. Just do it at any chance you get, around an hour between." This task falls to me, and I do it every now and then, at all kinds of times.
They send another tech guy, and all he does is quickly turn our dish a few inches, and then leaves again. If our Internet was bad before this visit, it is absolutely miserable now. It ended up cutting our speeds down even more. Present day, I haven't played anything other than LoL, and this is only possible from 1:00 am to 4:00 am.
The thing is, our Internet is bad in general, but it's also highly unstable. One minute, it'll be going great. The next, we'll get a cap of 0.10 Mbps Download speed and 0.05 Upload speed. Our latency is always, without fail, over 160 on the speed tester. We even bought and set up a new router, thinking that the old one was simply outdated now. No such luck.
Tonight is better than most nights, download and upload speed wise. The thing is, I can never tell. It's so unpredictable, one night can be great and fine, then the next can be the worst it's ever been.
Tonight's Speedtest @ 9:00 pm
What should I do? Any advice? If I left anything out, I'll probably edit it in shortly, it's a lot to write down for my tired self.
