I just got off the phone with my internet service provider, Time Warner Cable/RoadRunner. For the past 38 hours I’ve had extremely poor internet access speeds. After doing some checking I’m seeing intermittant periods of extreme packet loss. The customer serivce agent I spoke with attributed this to the “cold weather” and said ti should get better by Monday when things are supposed to warm up. I might have bought this argument if I lived in Florida but I live in Minnesota. It got cold, so what? It gets cold every year. Since Thursday night we’ve had a low of -13 degrees Farenheit and a high of 8 degrees Farenheit but mostly it’s been hovering right around zero degrees Farenheit. Sure it’s cold but it gets this cold for a few days every year and this is not out of line. I can’t quite understand where the problem lies. The transmission lines themselves should actually improve in cold weather so the only thing would be equipment in the equipment cabinents but surely those are heated, this is Minnesota after all. It sounds to me like the customer service agent is trying to pass off this outage on the cold weather because they either don’t know what’s going on or they’re to embarassed to admit it’s some kind of routing problem.
They probably don’t know what the problem is. Perhaps an errant cow? Usually like you, I can tell when the person I’m talking to is making it up as they go along. I HATE when they do that!