(Something went wrong with my previous attempt to post this message so I am trying again.)

I have been getting truly terrible service from Orcon for the last couple weeks or so. I don't understand at all what is going on and wanted to see if others are having similar issues before trying to contact the helpdesk.

I am on dial-up (not my choice) and the service has become extremely unreliable and seems to be getting steadily worse. Speeds go up and down like a yo-yo at all times, even so-called 'quiet' periods, but more and more are mostly down, usually way under 1 kilobit a second (not kidding). Frequently the connection gets dropped, usually just as a five-minute page load is reaching its end, and often it takes multiple tries even to get a connection. Sometimes the line is busy, sometimes it just doesn't pick up, sometimes it says I'm connected but there is no response to the browser or email client and I have to redial. Sometimes this happens after it has been working for awhile. More often I get ridiculously long delays, on the order of two minutes or more, while in the middle of loading a page. Everything just stops while my already limited bandwidth is given to someone else for a while. After a minute or two it may start again for a few seconds, then stop again. Or it may just stop altogether until I redial.

Since this weekend, I suddenly can't access the geekzone forums. I can reach the site eventually after several timeouts and disconnections, but as soon as any request is completed to api.microsofttranslator.com, everything stops. It doesn't hang, it just waits forever for a response that never comes. The only way I was able to post this message was by using Tor to log in (thus bypassing whatever block Orcon is putting in the way of microsofttranslator). It took me a good half-hour at speeds that probably averaged around 10-20 bits a second!

To get past the obvious things, we have multiple computers around the house (different phone connections, operating systems and modems) and they all behave the same. Sometimes, even now, things seem to work normally again for a short time, though this usually doesn't last long. That makes me think the problem isn't the wiring, since I would expect that to be more consistent, yet sometimes we do still get reliable speeds of around 4-6 kbs for 10 minutes or so, which is what I would consider normal for dial-up. I do strongly suspect the problem lies with Orcon, though when I complained about something similar in the past, they blamed line congestion (Telecom's fault) and of course, our wiring. The maddening thing is I have no way of proving otherwise.

So is anyone else experiencing anything like this, or am I the only one? I would really appreciate knowing what is going on here. Although some kind people are trying to help us get broadband in response to an earlier plea of mine, it won't happen for awhile in any case and in the meantime I really am living in dial-up hell.