RE: [ba-poker] Dependable Internet connection?

[rickie kerndt <stubing(deleted the rest)>]

>At this point I'd take someone who's seamlessly
>on 99% of the time but is unavailable for like a two-hour stretch sometime
>during the week than someone who's spotty several times an hour late at 
night.

Something you will only get (at least a guarantee for) with 'business' 
grade sDSL service and pay a lot more for less downstream bandwidth.

I have been having problems with Covad aDSL; enough that I'm planning to 
switch to SBC. So bad that playing online poker is too frustrating. Dropped 
connections several times a night going on for the last month!. Yuk, put me 
all-in twice. One on a hand I wasn't playing anyway and another I was; 
which won. That suxs!

Before deciding to switch you should try to identify where the outage is 
occurring. Don't expect SBC tech support to be of much help 
troubleshooting. Especially level 1 techs which can't do anything more than 
a ping. Traceroute will help with this or tracert in the PC world. Bring up 
a command shell and run tracert quads.paradise.com (whatever poker server 
you are connected to). A 'netstat -a' in the command shell will show you 
what servers your pc is connected (these commands will work with Win2k, 
WinXP). Should be obvious which is the poker server. Where packets first 
stop dropping is likely where the problem is.

If the problem turns out to be your dsl line, then you might ask them to 
reprovision your circuit to 'safe mode'. This will improve the noise 
margins on the circuit, though also lower your downstream bandwith. But 
consider, that no lost packets with 924Kbps is much better than dropping 
packets or losing connection at 1.5Mbps. Level 1 support should be able to 
do this on request. If it doesn't help you can call them back and have them 
remove 'safe mode.'

Problems upstream of the CO and your probably out of luck with SBC 
improving it. Can't offer suggestions for other providers as of the three 
I've tried SBC had the best performance.