Well, on top of being a councilman for Woodlawn Park, I am a Network Engineer by profession. I may make a few people mad with this comment, but here it goes....
When you call Insight, the Tier I and Tier II help desk employees know about as much about networking as the average person at a bowling alley. They have a standard script to follow like this:
How long has this been happening? ---> This tells them if they need to pay attention or not. If only a day, less important than if this is your fourth call.
!) Do you plug your connection straight into a PC, or into a router? If you say router, this absolutely HAS to be the issue, it can't possibly be Insight's problem. Have you unplugged it for a minute and then turned it back on?
2) Troubleshooting consists of pulling the power and/or coaxial cable out of the back of the modem, disconnecting the ethernet cable, and waiting about a minute before resetting it. Admittedly, this fixes around 50% of all problems (cheap hardware).
What Insight lacks is central tracking. Since our connections still show "up" but are degraded, they assume it is an individual service line connection problem. Their monitoring software isn't showing a huge issue since it's "intermittent" connectivity issues.
Since they base your complaint on your phone number, and not your address, they don't really catch on that something larger might be happening in your area because most people are assuming it's a temporary problem (even though we are into week 3 or 4 with this). I'd say ALL of Woodlawn Park's customers connected to Insight Broadband off of one main line into the neighborhood are having issues, unless of course they have the 20.0 service. Most probably just don't realize that their speed has been cut in half.
This really is an issue for one of their actual engineers to look at, but good luck getting them to acknowledge that or escalate it. It sounds like they have a hardware failure at the point where they provision the circuit, because I have not had a single issue since I switched to the 20.0, and yes, it's $120/yr extra, but since I'm on call, I can't not have a connection, and AT&T's 6mb service is almost twice what I am paying.
I know it is frustrating, especially since the other end of the phone is some 19yr old kid making $11/hr that really doesn't care about your problem, just his World of Warcraft game.
