Tech Notes from the Field

Just a quick post with an interesting anomaly. Personal/home network. Yes, I went with AT&T last year. Fiber to the house and 1GB up/down. So, here’s a new thing that occurred starting yesterday mid-morning:

Wife called saying everything is running slow. You know the generic stuff. I remotely checked what I could and I was having no issues seeing the modem. I did the AT&T speed test between them and the modem, >1GB up and down. Yes, that fast and symmetrical.

I get home and start poking around. First to note, the TV was working fine, without any issues. ????? I then have her demonstrate what she is seeing, and sure enough she goes to Quickbooks. Slow loading, and that was getting to the login page. Asked to try some other site, and the same result. Slow loading. I do a speed test and everything was as I expected. ????? The kiddo was on her phone and hitting that Tik Tok and was not having issues.

I have two AP (access points) for WiFi to cover the house. So I do the customary restarts of those. No change. I did the customary restart of the modem. No change. I poked around and tried to make things happen. I pulled out the laptop and I was able to duplicate the slow load of web sites. Once a site loaded, then navigating within the site seemed to be just fine. I did a couple of trace routes, one to Google, and one to Microsoft. Both took many hops, 25 and 26 respectively. Seems excessive to me.

Now I did a chat session with the AT&T gumby. Of course we do the modem reset, and yes, it reconfigured all my network information. It seemed to help, but not significantly. I asked if there was something going on with DNS or routing, and not to his knowledge. Typical response. Asked about the hops, and he says it is typical. I’ve done a few and it does seem typical, but I only get 18 hops at work to Google. I figured the big guys would have quick paths. Even the amazon app on my iPad was sloooooow. We scheduled a dispatch, but I think it is in the wild somewhere. During all this, I actually connected the wife’s computer directly to the modem, eliminating any other equipment, and I had the same results.

This morning it looks like things have settled down a bit, but I will not know until my wife starts work. Have anyone out there experienced this with AT&T? Other providers? I find this behavior odd as it was a pretty sudden onset, and we were not having such issues prior. Drop a note if you have, and if there was a solution, I would be very interested.

Cheers!

UPDATE: So, the day after all this mess with AT&T occurred, I received a text message saying the issue was identified and resolved. Apparently there was an issue out in the field that was not on their radar when I called. Still baffles me how companies continue to operate these days.