Pulp Free

It was bound to happen sooner or later. There were obvious signals that perhaps I should have taken into consideration. Heck – I’ve talked about it on here at least a half dozen times.

The Charter Bandwidth Police.

Last week there was a message on our answering machine stating that I needed to call back Charter Internet Security. This sounded a little worrisome especially since they left a case number. A hacked account? Mysterious content (kind of like when your credit card calls you from the fraud department…) Nope – Charter wanted to let me know I was flagged as a high bandwidth customer.

Specifically – I needed to cut back how much I was downloading. I asked, “How much did I use?” to which their response was very specific – “933 gigabytes.”

“Whoa – that’s a lot” I replied. Charter continued to say that they recently updated their policy and that I should really only be using 250 gigabytes a month or less. Most of their customers use less than 25 gigabytes Charter continued to tell me.

Considering 25 gigabytes of data wasn’t even enough to download one version of the software I use with my customers, this seemed perplexing.

I followed up stating that I actually work from home and download a lot of software for my job (which I do) and that February was a particularly busy month for releases (which it was). But when I inquired as to “how would a customer know how much they’ve been using” they simply stated there wasn’t a way currently. I would have to call into the customer service line for them to let me know if I was getting close. If only I had known!!

Guess I did know…

Fair enough… Of course, 250 GB can be downloaded in a little less than a day with my current bandwidth tier – maybe I should call them every day? Just to make sure I’m not over yet?

To be fair – I do work from home and to date I’ve accumulated about 350 gigabytes of product, but it’s quite possible there were some other items downloaded in February.

Clearly I won’t be trying to break the 1 terabyte usage in a month record any time soon…

This past week has been full of chaos. Am I talking about the revolts happening in Egypt? Nope – closer to home. Canada. Political unrest? Nope – Internet bandwidth metering.

You see, the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) approved UBB (usage based billing) for the incumbent carrier Bell Canada in September. Competitive ISPs, which connect to Canada’s top telco for last-mile copper connections to customers, will also be metered by Bell.

More background from my favorite tech news Web site:

Starting on March 1, Ontario TekSavvy members who subscribed to the 5Mbps plan have a new usage cap of 25GB, “substantially down from the 200GB or unlimited deals TekSavvy was able to offer before the CRTC’s decision to impose usage based billing,” the message added.

Ouch! 25GB a month? It’s time to take to the streets!

So news of this effort started populating the news channels the first of this week. It didn’t take long for a lot of comparisons to begin with Comcast’s 250GB cap nor for a simple reminder of my own fears, here, here, and oh yeah… most recently here (granted, this was talked about almost 2 years ago and has been pretty quiet around Charter-land for some time…)

While my previous calculations based on these overages was just a bit under $500, I was curious to see how my own bandwidth usage was being shaped over the years. Could I see a pattern? More usage? Less usage?

So there you have about four and a half years of my Internet bandwidth habits. Last May 2010 had a pretty good go at the 900GB mark. With my 30Mb/s peak usage (DL), I’m now capable of pulling in almost 10TB of data a month. So I’m using 10% of my capacity? (That made me chuckle.)

To be fair, I’ve now been working from home for the last 3 years and my job requires me to download hundreds of gigs of data every few months. So even if I average out my consumption (uploads & downloads), I’m looking at 260GB a month. Even more interesting is that when I do queue up those large downloads, I’m full speed (30Mb/s) the whole time. So I’m not if there’s a capacity issue where I’m at to begin with… And Charter is already offering double that speed (60Mb/s) – which means you would pass a 250GB cap in less than 10 hours… whoa.

So now that Canada started their own Internet Bandwidth riots, a few days after the first news story – the Canadian government stepped in and provided a bit of feedback to the whole situation.

The Harper government will overturn the CRTC’s decision that effectively ends “unlimited use” Internet plans if the regulator doesn’t rescind the decision itself.

Sounds good to me… We certainly don’t need such talks making more noise for us here in the States. Those bandwidth limitation ideas – NIMBY.

As spoke about a few weeks ago concerning my Charter Bandwidth upgrades – I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to assume “it just works” with anything Charter related. There has always been a Yin Yang relationship with Charter and I, this time still taking only a few days to come full circle. So what ails me this time around you ask? Here’s my story (and I will admit that only part of the story is the oddness that is Charter – the rest will unfold itself…)

With my old DOC SIS 2.0 modem everything has been happy go lucky for the last few years. Hooked up to my trusty Linksys WRT54GS wireless gateway which has proven remarkably stable and useful (while having used the Tomato firmware) – I probably would have gone on using wireless G networking for quite some time. However, I soon was prompted to upgrade my cable modem to a DOC SIS 3.0 modem as part of Charter’s free bandwidth upgrade… even though I was even getting my full 25 Mbps with the old one. Okay – sure… Why not.

New modem comes via FedEx… Plug it it, swap it out with the old one, Linksys won’t get a DHCP address. Hmmm. Plug my laptop directly in and see that it’s redirecting me to register my new modem. Cool. Get that done and I’m blazing at even faster speeds.

Now I’m pretty sure those speeds include Charter’s PowerBoost technology but I clearly wasn’t getting that with my old modem. Yeah.. I’m liking this. Until I plug the modem back into into my Linksys. The modem won’t assign the Linksys an IP address via DHCP.

A call into Charter Tech support tells me that they don’t support third-party gateways and that I’m on my own. If it works with a computer directly it’s good enough for them. Grrr… So I’m stuck a bit here… Faster speeds directly plugged in, router won’t get a connection. I’m back and forth with resetting the modem, the router – both at the same time, one and a time, different orders… Then after about 30 minutes – voila! The Linksys gets an IP address!! What is odd is that the laptop plugged directly into the modem gets a 24.x.x.x IP address, the Linksys always gets a 72.x.x.x address. Oh well. At least it’s working, right??

Sort of.

Now for part 2…

I start running bandwidth tests and they’re coming out quite random. 10 Mbps, 13, 17, 12, 9, 20, 21 down… But always 3 Mbps up. I start hunting around for lots of different testing Web sites. Still the same. Even stranger is that the tests are fraught with peaks and valleys during the tests. They would jump up to 10 then down to 4 then up to 12 and hang out for a bit… With the old modem the tests would hit up to 25 Mbps and stay there the whole time. I do a direct connection back to my laptop – rock steady. This is just strange.

Next up is to work with Charter Technical support (oh no…) and eventually get them to swap out the modem. However, same issue. Except that this time I’m never able to get a DHCP address for the Linksys. (Come to find out that you need to do MAC address cloning now… Maybe. At least it worked for me and some others… I’ll experiment more with hard resetting both modem and router to use the built in MAC addresses…)

Now it’s time for me to do some research and my own technical support. I start thinking about what else could be the issue. All has been well up to now… Bandwidth is pretty fast up to 25 Mbps with the original modem and gateway… But I never got the greater than 25 Mbps speed boost until the new modem was directly connected to my laptop. Lots of variables – but let’s dive into Linksys first…

My first hunch proved fruitful… When really pushing bandwidth or connections through this gateway I would get pretty high CPU spikes:

So if that was happening even before the 25 Mbps upgrade, I started to wonder just how bad is it now? Especially with PowerBoost potentially pushing 60+ Mbps spikes…

A quick look at running the top command during some of the bandwidth tests showed me right away… 100% CPU utilization on downloads, uploads were around 20%. My poor little Linksys just couldn’t keep up with managing the bandwidth. Whew! Now we’re on to something – and so not a Charter issue… a router issue!

Taking into account that that Linksys WRT54GS was now probably 7+ years old, I decided to spend a little bit of time looking at the newer Linksys gateways as a replacement – leaning towards a WRT320N. Essentially needing a more powerful processor it seemed to fit the bill. Also trying to keep under $100 with Gigabit ports I poked around a few other Web sites to get some reviews. Actually not bad but it seemed to be a bit shaky on running my favorite firmware Tomato. Next up was now looking at the Netgear WNR3500L. While I’ve been pretty loyal to Linksys for the last 10+ years, I started to stray more for something that was open, extensible – and I knew could run Tomato. Similar specs and “mostly” open source, a quick order to Newegg on a Monday and it was delivered by Tuesday!!

With the WNR3500L now plugged in and configured (along with that nasty MAC address cloning work-around) – my bandwidth testing was spot on. Very low (if any) CPU usage during the bandwidth tests provided the 58.69 Mbps download benchmark and I couldn’t be happier! Well, at least about getting steady bandwidth back into my home Internet network. I’m still working through the wireless features since it seems that signal strength isn’t as strong. The Netgear now has Tomato 1.27 firmware running on it but taking only Wireless-N clients (which is only my work laptop and it’s mostly docked into my wired network). The old Linksys is now serving the Wireless-G crowd on a second SSID and doing quite well (those devices connected to Wireless-G on my network aren’t heavy bandwidth consumers).

So I learned a few lessons through this effort…

• It’s not always Charter’s fault.
• Sometimes you do need to hardware to take advantage of new technologies
• Troubleshooting can be fun
• Still derive a little bit of satisfaction hunting down issues and finding root cause
• I still love my Cacti graphs
• I’m more grateful when it just works

Now it’s time to cleanup the messy wires on the network and cable distribution wall in the basement and put everything back together… What a clutter that is!

Without much fanfare or customer communications, it seems as though Charter has upgraded their bandwidth speeds for their cable Internet services with no additional cost to customers. I can’t complain too much about that, now can I?The new speed increases impact three of their broadband plans. Only “Lite” speeds remain unchanged:

• Lite: Remains the same at “up to” 1 Mbps/128 kbps
• Express: Increases from 5/1 Mbps to 8/1 Mbps
• Plus: Increases from 10/2 Mbps to 16/2 Mbps
• Max: Increases from 20/2 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps

Based on an article by Phillip Dampier, Charter is also being a bit soft on previously announced bandwidth usage caps… Something I’m quite happy with but have spoken about such disappointment before. While I am currently passing over $60 a month for the Max speed, I’d be quite curious what their limited available offering of Ultra60 plan for 60/5 Mbps service would be like. At $140 a month, I won’t be all that tempted to test the waters. And for the most part, I seemingly already have faster Internet services than most corporate locations I visit. The issue isn’t my connection any more but rather the content providers.

Without any HD Winter Olympic coverage to worry about like a few summers ago along with ramping up on my new job (that is providing the need for a lot of ISO and software downloads) – I’ve actually been pretty lean on my bandwidth usage.

August of 2008 still holds the record… Does make me wonder if I could actually set the bandwidth faucet on full and pull down ~264 GB of data a day or close to 8 TB of bandwidth for the month. Whew! I think I’d get bored with trying to find enough stuff to download to keep that queue filled.

So positive vibes right now for Charter – even after spending an hour on the phone with their Customer Service slash retention team to renew my bundle pricing… (Don’t even get me started…)

And Charter Melissa – I hope you were able to finish your research project with your extra bandwidth!

I was happy a few days ago with my updated Charter broadband speeds. Figured today I’d have to have some therapy. My love hate relationship continues.

My overly priced $142.03 HD Cable, Internet and Phone “Bundle” decided to unbundle itself – now coming in at $177.99 – I just about gagged myself.

Called into customer service and they can’t make any adjustments. Every year for many, many years Charter has been kind enough to reset my promo for another 12 months… Usually a few dollars more (meaning less than $5). This time around I’d have to buy more channels… More HBO and Cinemax. More Stars… Things we don’t need or want to watch. I asked for a line manager since I wanted to express my loyalty to Charter that seemed to be going unnoticed.

Line manager comes online and blows attitude after a few words of my background story. I asked why the attitude and he cuts me off and puts me on hold. Then tells me for $147.77 a month I can keep what I already have for 6 more months.

How hard can it be? I suppose for another $5 I could have picked up some more movie channels. Bleh. No wonder why they’re almost bankrupt. Customer service has always been their issue. Of course, people wouldn’t be calling into customer service if they didn’t screw up their billing and promotions all the time. People in the field have always been great.

Best of luck out there… I know a few of you are having your own issues. Care to share?