I’ve noticed recently that more and more big downloads were failing. I bought a bunch of Dobro lessons that were delivered via download; each lesson was about half a gigabyte. The server didn’t support multi-part access or resuming. Over a period of several days, I was able to download precisely zero files.
My main ISP is AT&T from whom I get two bonded T1 lines. My backup ISP is Wildblue, from whom I get a satellite link. I told the firewall to make AT&T the backup Internet link and Wildblue the primary. I was able to download all the files. Not one download failed.
In a search for some precision, I pinged google.com 1024 times over AT&T:
I did the same thing over Wildblue:
I wondered if packet size made a difference, so I pinged AT&T 1024 times with 1024-byte packets:
I did the same thing with Wildblue:
Just to make sure that there’s no problem with the LAN, I pinged the firewall:
My conclusion is that AT&T’s packet loss is substantially greater than Wildblue’s and the difference is greater when the packet size is bigger.
Time to call AT&T.
Leave a Reply