EDIT: Well, this got more popular than I ever expected. Resizing the linode now. Should be back up soon.<p>After months of fighting with CableOne about speed and service problems, I decided to finally spice up my website dedicated to their poor service: www.iscableoneshitty.com<p>Now, instead of just saying "YES," it gives an actual representation of the quality of the connection to my house. The server pings my modem 5 times at the top of every minute. It takes the response times and averages them.<p>If the average response time is <60ms, it reads "NOT CURRENTLY."<p>If the average response time is between 60 and 100ms, it reads "MOSTLY."<p>If the average response time is >100ms and <150ms, it reads "YES."<p>If the average response time is >150ms, it reads "VERY YES."<p>I've distributed to friends and neighbors in the area, because almost every one in my town is on CableOne for lack of other choices, so they can check and see if at least someone else is having trouble.<p>I have thoughts of actually tracking the data and compiling monthly reports of downtime and slowness, I just haven't gotten around to that yet.
I just went through a 2 month ordeal with my ISP trying to get basic service. It's working now so I think it's resolved for the moment but I don't have much faith in them. Unfortunately I'm expecting further outages.<p>I thought about making a tool like this as well as crazier ideas like getting my lawyer to sue them for their incompetence - as it happens they are my only option for broadband.<p>What I'd like and I think alot of other customers would like is a little app to run on my computers that tracks when my internet connection goes down and for exactly how long. I pay a fixed amount monthly. As I'm concerned that pro-rata amount of lost connection time should be refunded to me from the ISP. There is no incentive for them to get better unless they lose money from their shit service.<p>I think it'd be a good adware product to cover basic expenses, and maybe some money could be made by taking a peice of crowd funded lawsuits vs ISPs. With my ISPs customer base, I don't think it'd be too hard to find contributors...
It's more dramatic, and historically useful, to pipe the output from ping into Graphite, and keep a few months worth of data. Really shuts up the techs who come over and say everything's fine.
I worked at a company that made electricity usage monitors. The little boxes would send data to us with energy usage every minute.<p>We could see how often internet went down, based on how many times the boxes sent us "stored" data.<p>We didn't do any analysis on the data, but we did note that the residential internet while good isn't as always on as you think it should be. We were wondering how much of a problem this was going to be for home automation. (It would be frustrating not to be able to connect)<p>Also of note in the three years I was there before I left, its seemed to be getting better. It might be that the business switched more to corporate customers and there internet was better. We ended up doing some thermostat control and it worked for the most part (Most wifi thermostats are kinda crappy, thus the rise of the nest)