I don’t know about you, but my (home) Internet service has been slow lately.
I run Bresnan, and I’ve been on the phone with various technical support agents over the past 10 days or so, trying to find out why my download speeds are hovering between 83 kb/s and 400 kb/s when I should be measuring in the megabits per second range.
Other people have commiserated with me on Twitter, and one other person here in the Chronicle office said he’d been unable, at times, to connect to the Internet at all through his Bresnan connection over the past week.
So today I spoke with Bresnan spokesman Shawn Beqaj, who told me that Bresnan replaced a CMTS router last week that affects the Bozeman area. The new router is part of Bresnan’s continuing upgrade cycle, which Beqaj saidcosts the company tens of millions of dollars a year.
Beqaj acknowledge that there have been reports of Internet speed slow-downs in the Bozeman area. He characterized the slow-down as a “communication issue” between the router in your closet and the wider network.
“There were some older modems in the field that were not compatible with it, and those modems saw a diminishment of their speed,” Beqaj said.
Beqaj said that there have been no reports of outages related to this network work.
Beqaj told me that engineers were working on the slow-down problem and that, for the most part, the issue should iron itself out in a few days as the “communication issue” is solved.
I also called Bresnan technical support today, where the tech told me that the problem stems from a network traffic bottlenecking issue, where Bresnan’s traffic is being squeezed through a router in Denver that can’t quite move the data fast enough.
The tech on the phone had no idea when the issue would be solved and only said that engineers were working on it.
I’m not a network engineer, but it sounds to me like these issues could be related. All I know is that I can’t watch Hulu videos without constant re-buffering, and it irks me.
Are you having Internet speed issues in Bozeman? Beqaj suggested calling Bresnan’s help number at 1-877-BRESNAN. I suggest that you tell me about your issues in the comments on this post.