Backtrack: the Week of 20 July

Continued petty problems with TWC/Roadrunner. Services have been sketchy for three weeks.

• DNS is flakey. Usual symptoms: slow web loads; unexpected starts and stops when loading pages; hangs and timeouts before connecting. nslookup shows response times in excess of 5-10 seconds.
  
• Is Roadrunner throttling automatically? A large FTP transfer ran fine, then the byte rate suddenly dropped to 10-12 KB/s. It seems to recur: large transfers start well, then drop off. More than one target site has this problem.
• Netflix "Watch Instantly" shifts to low-res mode even when playing mornings and mid-day.
  

Several calls, lasting 30 minutes to an hour, come up empty. Everything is working on RR's end.

Hard-configuring RR DNS with a third open DNS service helps. But bit rates, once in the 5-6Mbps range, are now hover the 2-3Mbps range; upstream is worse. A good day sees 4Mbps downstream, 400Kbps up.