Restoring my Dad’s Ishapore Enfield 7.62 Rifle

Little did I know what I had in my hand when I picked up my Dad’s rifle the other day. My father died last year and left me his rifle, but only recently had I been able to go back to see Becky and pick up the rifle to bring it home.

I’m pretty sure he didn’t know it when he bought it, but what you’re looking at in the photo above is the last class of non-sniper military bolt action rifles ever designed anywhere in the world.  The Enfield Ishapore 2A/2A1 Bolt Action 7.62MM NATO rifle is a beautiful piece of weaponry

The rifle often has the misfortune of being called a .308, which is indeed what my Dad fired in it. In actuality, it’s not a .308 rifle at all. The Enfield 2A1 was the last Lee-Enfield rifle ever made. They bear a striking resemblance to their forefather, the British .303 SMLE MKIII, which shoots a 5.65mm round. The only visible difference between the two rifles is the 7.62 2A1 model has a squared cartridge that holds 12 rounds where the original MKIII had a sloped cartridge case that only fired 10 rounds. The only other difference is due do the difference in ammunition types. The ejection claw on the 2A1 model has slightly more metal to accommodate the rimless NATO round.

This particular rifle was built during the last years Ishapore made these. You can tell because the rear sight was changed from a 2,000 meter sighting design to an 800 meter sighting design. When this rifle was put heavily into use, the days of long range volley fire was over in India, so the decision was made to recalibrate the rear sight to a more accurate need of the time.

The weapon specs, if you’re a fan of rifles are:

Production: Ishapore India. also known as the Ishapore Armory, located outside Calcutta in West Bengal.
Designed: 1963
Produced: 1963-1975
Number Built: Approximately 350,000 rifles made.
Weight: 4.7kg unloaded (10.36 pounds)
Length: 44.5 inches
Caliber: 7.62x51 NATO
Barrel Length: 25.2”
Action: Bolt Action
Rate of Fire: 20-30 rounds per minute
Muzzle Velocity: 2,600 feet per second
Effective Range: 800 meters (1/2 mile)
Maximum Range: 2,000 meters (1.25 miles)
Sights: Sliding Ramp rear sights, fixed-post front sight.

Why were these rifles ever made in the first place?

This rifle and it’s 350,000 or so brothers, were created for the Indian army after their army suffered a defeat in 1962 from Chinese troops armed with Type 56 SKS, AK and PPSh submachine guns. India needed a better rifle. They immediately decided to redesign a rifle to use the more popular and more accurate 7.62mm round. They had the 7.62 round, but not enough rifles to shoot all the ammunition they had. Thus, the last of the Lee-Enfield rifles was born. Incidentally it should be noted that the 7.62 2A1 model rifle made by Ishapore has approximately 10% more power than the .303 it was modeled after, which equates in the field to a flatter trajectory out of the barrel, resulting in about 10% better accuracy.

The action and bolt, before cleaning. It’s dirty, but not bad for a rifle that’s 43 years old and been through a war (or two).

The front of the rifle contains a two post sight protector and bayonet mount.

Just a photo sighting down the rifle.  Hard to believe this thing can shoot a 1 inch pattern at half a mile and a 3 inch pattern at 1.25 miles without a scope huh?

At this point I’ve started disassembling the fore-stock and hand guard so I can clean both the wood and the steel. The wood stocks on these rifles is cut from Italian Walnut, which is obviously very resilient!

The trigger has been removed for cleaning. You can’t see it too well here but that black band in front of the stock contains the rifle markings that tell you what it is, and where and when it was made.

 

The Serial number of the rifle: U2940

 

Here she is almost completely broken down. The rear stock takes an especially long flat blade screwdriver to remove, and since there are so few moving parts left in the remaining steel, I decided to clean the remaining parts in-situ instead of taking it all the way apart to get at only one more piece of steel that I can already get to anyway from here mostly.

After some serious time spent with the wood, solvents, and sandpaper I’ve finally gotten the gunk and grime off the walnut and re-oiled the wood so it can retain some of it’s moisture. Having a dry-stock on a wooden rifle is bad for your shooting and bad for the rifle’s longevity as well.

She looks pretty now that she’s all cleaned out. Forty three years of oil, dirt particles, and left over packing grease were gobbed up inside the wood. However, removing that much grease means it has to be oiled a LOT for the next couple weeks.

Finally Done:

Here are a few photos of the rifle after it has been completely cleaned and reassembled.

 

I could possibly have removed the marks left over the years near the action, but I felt it more appropriate to leave them here as a reminder of the other men who held her and fired her in war.

The wood-grain on this thing is beautiful!

Reassembled and beautiful.

The serial number for this rifle.

The Ishapore factory stamp.

 

What is an Enfield .308?

I decided to mention this so others won’t make the same mistake I did at first. Simply put, there is absolutely no such thing as an Enfield .308 rifle. The physical characteristics of the .308 and the7.62 mm NATO round are so similar that many shooters inadvertently use the wrong ammunition simply because it fits. Will this rifle fire a .308 bullet? Yes it will. I shot an entire box of them yesterday as a matter of fact, however it’s not designed to do so.

Why? There are a couple of reasons NOT to shoot .308 load in a military rifle, and I’ll leave the majority of them for another discussion and just give you the important reason: It can blow up in your face. Commercial brass cartridge casings are thinner than military casings. There’s less brass behind the bullet. Both thickness and depth of the rim are slightly different. It’s a very very slight difference, but it’s enough. There may not be enough material in the shell casing to stretch to fill the chamber without rupturing when you pull the trigger. Normally, the case expands to completely fill the chamber, forcing the bullet down the barrel with the approximately 58,000 psi. If the casing were to rupture on civilian brass, the exhaust could instead rupture over into the receiver of the rifle and blow up in your hand. Does it happen often? Obviously not, but I’m not taking the chance any more. If you’d like more info on the differences between 7.62 NATO and .308 Winchester Ammo, you can read in detail here.

Disassembling your own Enfield 7.62 Rifle

I’ll save you some of the headache and frustration I went through trying to find an original schematic for a weapon produced in India in the 1960s, for Britain. If I had thought to bookmark the source forum, I’d gladly give the poster the credit, but I didn’t think to do so. Anyway, the basic configuration and design of the Ishapore 2A/2A1 is based of the .303, so the original 1945 schematic for the .303 will guide you through disassembling and finding replacement parts for the weapon. I’ve put a copy of the PDF on my server. You can download it by clicking here. (2.5mb PDF file)

Final Thoughts

The picture above shows Indian soldiers carrying this very rifle on a patrol during the Sino=-Indian war. Someone long ago laid silent, looking across a mountain valley, 12,300 miles from where this rifle now sits, hands clenched tightly around the fore-stock, squeezing then relaxing to keep the blood flowing during the frigid cold, his body heat leeching away into the hard cold ground hour after hour. He laid there on the Himalayan border between India and China and used this exact rifle to shoot down enemy Chinese soldiers from distances up to 1 mile away, a distance so far that most modern shooters of today wouldn’t even attempt it. At that distance a human body resembles not so much the shape of a man as a tiny speck on a faraway hill or mountain. 

The Chinese enemy they faced later reported that they often thought they were facing machine gun fire, due to the rapidity of shots coming from the muzzles of these rifles. Expert shooters could put from 25 to 40 rounds within a 3 inch kill zone from half a mile. Considering these rifles have no scope and only a 10-12 round magazine, that means reloading two to three times reloading per minute while still reacquiring your target and making the shot again and again.

It’s just awesome to think of that kind of history. I’ll never know the story of this particular rifle, but I’d love to know it’s journey from there to its final destination where it lies now.

Why First South Bank is PISSING me off!

Let me start this by saying the following: I’ve been banking here with my personal finances for about 5 years, and with my business finances for about 3 years. You might ask yourself why, if I’m so pissed off, don’t I just change banks?

I’ve banked all over the place over the years, but I’ve never ever ever ever ever ever had the customer service and personal attention to detail that the staff of First South Bank provides. Their people are friendly, attentive, and go WAY beyond the call of duty to keep customers happy! I want to make that perfectly clear before I go any farther.

So, let me explain the problem in detail.

• First South Bank’s online banking is flawed.
• I brought this to their attention in June of 2009.
• I then told them how to fix it and spent over a month working with their tech department to correct it for ALL their customers, not just myself.
• They fixed it so FSB online banking worked properly with QuickBooks. Hooray!
• Two weeks later it’s broken again.
• I called and spoke to IT and was told that a Microsoft Money customer called in and said his free-personal online banking downloads weren’t functioning properly, so they reverted it back.

In short, NO BUSINESS IN THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA runs its books through Microsoft Money. It’s a safe bet to say that 85% of ALL SMALL COMMERCIAL BUSINESSES use QuickBooks for financial processing.

First South Bank chose to keep the free-personal checking account users happy, but intentionally re-broke the system again making it a NIGHTMARE for business customers like myself.

Why are you complaining now?

In short, I’m complaining now publicly because my 12 months of phone calls and emails were finally greeted with (From the director of Online Banking) the answer of “We don’t know how to fix it!” Further, I just spent three hours of my afternoon doing what should have taken me less than 5 minutes to do… and I spent that time because the bank’s processing engine is screwing up. I’ve even offered to work with them to fix it myself. It’s not rocket science! It’s ONE feature of their exporting engine that needs to be changed. That’s it.

Let me explain (for the hundredth time) what the problem is. I’m going to use QuickBooks 2010 examples because they’ve already seen all the screenshots from 2009 and maybe they’ll understand this better if I use the current version.

When a business person downloads their online banking into QuickBooks from First South Bank, QuickBooks does a quick comparison against your check register and marks all the downloaded transactions as either matched, or unmatched.

Matched transactions means you already typed this check or purchase into QuickBooks and your online banking matches perfectly, so you can simply press DONE and all the matched transactions will be reconciled against your check ledger.

Unmatched Transactions (usually online or debit purchases you forgot to enter into QuickBooks when you made them) are left out for you to match up to their proper payee and assign the proper chart of accounts entry. I’ll use an example of McDonalds Fast Food.

If I’m making my first purchase at McDonalds, the download wont know who it is. I’ll simply tell QuickBooks that McDonalds purchases get filed under Meals and Entertainment from now on and then every subsequent McDonalds purchase will be filed accordingly. Makes absolute perfect sense, right? It does this using the Payee Name field. If I say “if the payee includes the words McDon…”, then it change the name to McDonalds

Why doesn’t it work for First South Bank

First South Bank’s back-end processing is handled by two parties. The party that processes the information is called Digital Insights and is owned by Intuit, who also owns QuickBooks and Quicken. They are doing THEIR job properly.

When the transaction data is passed off from the back end to the online check register, that information is handled by another smaller company, of which First South Bank is their largest customer. They are simply screwing up their job.

How are they screwing it up?

Let’s get detailed for a moment here. An electronic transaction requires a few pieces of information to be transmitted in the proper order so you know what the check is for and how much. Those fields are (using examples in the order of migration into QuickBooks)

• Account (Which account it’s going into)
• Check Number
• Date
• Payee
• Amount
• Memo
• and some others that are specific to individual programs.

When First South’s data processor parses the export for download into .qbo web connect files, it is supposed to follow a certain order, shown above. Instead they are parsing it in the following order.

• Account
• Check Number
• Date
• Memo
• Amount
• Payee

Do you notice that these two fields above are reversed from what they are supposed to be in the previous example? This is the problem.

Why is this the problem?

Glad you asked! When you run your card at various locations (and I’ll keep the McDonalds’ example going here from before) the memo field of the payment usually says something like “point of sale withdrawal” and the payee says McDonalds Store #123 or whatever.

Since First South is processing the information backwards, all their business customers downloads are showing the PAYEE as “point of sale withdrawal” and the Memo field as the name of the vendor.

How do you know?

Well, I know because I’ve been showing them screen shots for over a year, but I thought you might ask so now I’m going to share them with you too so you can see for yourself.

Click the images below to see them in their original size.

Example 1

This image shows you what your register looks like before you try to match the transaction. You see where the downloaded payee name (I highlighted it in red for you) says “Point of Sale Withdrawal. That’s incorrect.

Example 2

If you clink the link to “Show splits, memo, date, number” you then get to see further details from the transaction. The PAYEE is supposed to be McDonalds and the MEMO field is supposed to be “point of sale withdrawal”.

Notice here that I still have 87 transactions to match up on the left side of my screen (almost 100% of which would have already been matched if they knew what the hell they were doing!)

 

Example 3

Of course I do what any of you would do… I simply type McDonald’s as the Payee and THEN QuickBooks knows what to do with the transaction. As you can see it automatically chose “Travel and Entertainment: Meals” as the proper category for the expense.

But look what happened on the left side of the screen… oh no! Now I have 87 unmatched transactions ALL payable to McDonalds. So now, what do I do?

Example 4

Well, now I have to go into the renaming rules feature of QuickBooks and tell it to remove the rule shown below. Since First South is processing the information wrong, QuickBooks assumes that the payee Point of Sale Withdrawal is actually McDonalds so every single remaining transaction with the word “point of sale withdrawal” gets renamed until you come here and take out the rule. As soon as you remove the rule,they are all renamed back to “point of sale withdrawal’ as seen in example 1… UNTIL you change the payee of the next transaction at which point the register takes the name of the next vendor (Lowe’s, Food Lion, Staples, etc) and makes the same mistake. It’s a time-consuming nightmare that QuickBooks customers should not have to tolerate.

 

Final Result

The final result is that the head of online banking at First South Bank needs to find another job. Over the last 12 months I’ve dealt with three branch managers, online support, and IT about this problem… I actually had one branch manager at the Arlington branch tell me “That’s why I keep losing commercial customers. They keep saying they can’t use quickbooks, but I didn’t understand why until now.”

Yes, that’s why you’re losing customers. I’ve tried dealing with the staff in Washington at the NOC to address the problem but they apparently decided that being able to support Quickbooks for business customers wasn’t important. This is my last ditch effort to get this bank to fix this problem. Your people in Online Banking have no idea what they’re doing. Your web site uses flash-cookies, your transaction data doesn’t download properly… the list goes on. You have the best people I’ve ever dealt with working in your banks! That’s the reason I’m still there. You can’t beat their customer service and friendliness and attentiveness anywhere else in the world, but your back-end banking infrastructure is run on a shoe-string and needs some serious overhaul. I’ve offered to work with the IT team responsible for handling this problem on an absolutely pro-bono basis, just to get this fixed and still got no results.

FYI: Before you blame it on IT, I know better. This isn’t handled under the bailiwick of the First South Bank IT department or their outsourced vendor Web Pointe. This is an external vendor problem… a vendor who can’t do the job because First South is the largest customer they deal with and they’re used to mom and pop-style banks with 2 locations, not 24 location enterprises with over 100 ATM’s and a 300 person staff. Please find another vendor to handle your processing or do something to fix it in-house yourself. Your bank and it’s people are too wonderful to be losing customers because one person in Online Banking can’t do her job.

Sincerely,

Tommy

In case you’re curious:

Just in case, I’ll give some more background on the matter.

Yes, QuickBooks 2007-2010 work FINE with Wachovia, Bank of America, First Citizens, and the State Employees Credit Union. I’m an IT rep and I have to assist my customers with QuickBooks all the time, so I KNOW these work because I do them for customers with no problem.

Yes, First South Bank data works fine with Microsoft Money and Quicken Home, as well as Quicken Deluxe. It is NOT the processor who’s screwing it up. It’s the protocol that’s compiling the .qbo extenstion, which is unique to QuickBooks itself.

Yes, this file is generated on-demand by your First South back end processing system, so yes it’s your fault. Fix it.

No, you’re the only bank in town with this problem. Again…. call around and ask your other banks and see if they have the issue. They don’t!

Leftovers

Today is another day where I look at the title line of my blog and simply watch the cursor blink impatiently for me to give it direction. I don’t have anything important to say today, however I’m trying to revive my love of writing and the only way to nurture a thing to life is to give it your attention. So the keyboard is going to get my attention whether it wants it or not.

It’s been a semi-slow week this week at work. Tim has been sick since he returned home from skiing last week and I’ve been working remotely for most of the week because most of my work has been keyboard labor; fixing computers remotely, correcting email issues, setting up new accounts and the like. It gets claustrophobic sometimes but there is also something to be said for working all day in the comfort of pajamas with the coffee pot three feet away, especially on these cold, rainy, miserable days we’ve had lately.

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Suddenlink Sucks- Won’t Fix Known Issue for Three Months!

 

Ok. If you wonder what that picture is, it’s my internet connection taking another nose dive for about the 50th time tonight!

I’m tired of working with customer support and now I’m going to take this to the next level. I seem to have real luck with the “Insert name Here Sucks” style posts if you look back at the rants I did on PowWeb, Fox8Fox14, and Vonage that got immediate attention from customer support. So, while I think the word “sucks” might be overkill (at least for now), it will garnish the Google ranking I’m looking for, probably get some DIGG traction, and maybe gather the attention of those at Suddenlink who need to pull their heads out of their rear-end and get this problem fixed. Most people find out in the end that I’m NOT the kind of guy to screw around with Customer Support for long. If they don’t fix the problem I’m pretty quick to get someone on the phone who gets paid enough to listen to me yell at them until the problem IS fixed. And I’m a document nazi… I take notes, write things down, organize…

 

Why are you complaining Tommy?

Backstory

Let me start by explaining that I’m NOT your average home user. I own and operate an IT company that services the cable, fiber, satellite, and DSL industry. I do professional installation on T-1, DSL, DS3, VSAT, FIOS, and cable connections.  I don’t want a pat on the back or anything, but I just need those at Suddenlink who read this that I’m not a net-tard at home with too much free time on his hands who can’t torrent fast enough. In fact, I was TRYING to work until I finally had to give up entirely because the web server I’m trying to connect to in order to work on a client’s web site can’t authenticate me because my connection keeps going down every 30 seconds, so now I have absolutely nothing to do except sit here and watch my connection flutter while I steam between the ears at customer support. I’ve spent three months trying to work through proper channels, and have gotten nowhere so now I’m taking this story to the blogosphere.

My Story Begins

On February 17th I had been experiencing severe speed issues for almost three weeks. At first I attributed it to just a bad week with the ISP, but after three weeks it needed to be addressed. I called Suddenlink and went through the usual mumbo jumbo with technical support that everyone has to. Is it your jack? Is it your router? Must be your computer. How old is your modem? etc. We moved my cable modem from room to room, tried wired and wireless, replaced the RG-6 cabling, replaced the Cat5 cabling to the router, replaced the Cat5 cable between the router and the modem, and basically went through everything possible to remedy my connection issues with no success. I started pulling bandwidth tests and noticed I’m getting anywhere between 1-3 mbits and I’m paying for 8, to the tune of about $120.00 per month for internet and television. I originally ordered the absolute highest package they had at the time, though they’ve since increased to a 12mb package. So, naturally we scheduled a technician to come out.

 

Tech 1:

I’ll have to apologize for not getting all the technician and support representatives names, but I just didn’t think of it at the time. Anyway… Technician 1 was supposed to be here on the 20th of February, so I waited around all day working at home, or trying to, so I could meet this guy. I finally called and got informed “the tech said no one was home.” WHAT? I was here ALL day. Ok fine, let’s schedule another tech and this time I want a phone call when he’s coming. I’m going to be here but I want this guy on the phone to tell me when he’s here so we can be sure he’s not going to the wrong door or something.

Feb 23rd: The technician they sent out was very nice, very courteous, and completely stumped. He took a look at my speed tests and suggested replacing the cable between the modem and the wall. Ok.. we cut a new cable,  tested it for dBm loss on his T-Berd tester, plugged it in place and rebooted. No change. The speed was no better, no worse. We tried connecting direct to the modem, connecting via wi-fi, etc. The end result was that he suggested I buy a new cable modem! Really? You serious? You think cable modems just kinda get slow after they get old? Dude, it was pushing 8 megs solid for the last FOUR years and now it just cant’ handle more than four megs? It’s not a 1960 Chevy with a burnt valve, it’s a modem!

Ok..  so now I’m a little miffed but not at him. He’s just doing his job So I did as I was asked; went to Suddenlink, purchased a new cable modem, stopped by Staples on the way home and got a new WRT54G router because I was pretty sure that would be blamed next. I came home, installed my new modem and router and called to get it provisioned. Guess what… no improvement.  Now I repeated the entire phone call except I had to add the “it’s not my equipment” line to my story to get someone to take me seriously.

 

Tech 2:

March 2nd: After another flurry of support calls I get a guy from maintenance, and as I understand Suddenlink’s hierarchy there  are Level 1 Techs, Level 2 Engineers, and Level 3 Maintenance, or so I’ve been told. So, I’m getting a guy from maintenance. I’m thinking we’ll get something accomplished now. This guy arrives at 0750 in the morning. Good GOD I didn’t want to see someone at that hour. I answered the door in my PJs and we talked about the problems.  He breaks out his T-Berd and checks the connection from my jack to the building. No problem there. How about from the building to the Tap? (the tap is the connection at the street where this node and others feed into the main line). Yup. That’s good too. So I suggest in my  nicest southern manner “Hey, how about checking from the tap to the head end?” He disappears again for a few minutes and comes back in and tells me  “Yup. That sucks.” I Swear to God those were his exact words. He was pulling less than 1 mb at 7:50 in the morning. I don’t usually even have problems at this hour, rather it’s the evenings when my speed really sucks and what I’ve been complaining about all along. He tells me he’s quite sure it’s an MTS issue, meaning it’s something that’s got to be fixed in Suddenlink’s main switch location and nothing we can fix on my end at my house.

Brief Mini-Lesson: Cable Modem Terminology

The image above shows a normal cable internet configuration: A “node” is a group of users. It could be 50 or it could be 400 depending on where you live in a town or city. I’m not sure what Suddenlink’s node average is, but it is typically a neighborhood, community, or some substantial group of users.

Many nodes plug into one CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) located back at the cable company’s switch room. One CMTS can handle up to 1,000 users.

Many CMTS’ plug into one HFC (Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial) to go out to the internet.

It might be plausible to have 400 users on a node in a retirement community because older netizens don't use the net that much, however I would imagine it would be much less users in a community like mine because we’re all middle age tech-geeks that LIVE on the net.  (END OF LESSON)

Being the doggedly persistent person I am, I decided to call Suddenlink the next day and check on the process to see what’s happened. Nothing. Nothing has happened. There were no notes about the MTS issue. So, truly miffed, I got on the phone with a Supervisor and explained to him that the issue was on the MTS end and that they needed to fix it. He wanted to know who informed me it was an MTS issue.. so I told him… “your engineer did. Duh.” He really wasn’t happy that the suddenlink engineer admitted it was their fault. Now he KNOWS they have to fix it and he knows I know they have to fix it. I asked how long I could expect before I could have my node transferred to another card in their switching office. I was basically told (and this is true) that they can’t simply unplug my card without unplugging an entire neighborhood. I told him I’ve done multi-thousand DSLAM user installation and I’m familiar with the headaches involved, but I wanted SOME kind of date. He told me I could expect it to be at least two months before anything happened.

March 25th: Email Begins

Having discovered for myself that this isn’t working, I get frustrated after a few more weeks of poor connectivity and decide to try to email customer support about the problem and maybe get a fresh perspective. This is the email I sent to Suddenlink on the 25thof March via their web submission form.

I've been having major internet troubles now for over two months, all documented in my account history. It took me almost a month to get the maintenance department to admit it's an MTC issue on Suddenlink's end, requiring my local node to be moved to new line cards on Suddenlink's end. Repeated calls to customer support have gotten me nowhere. I'm paying for 8 MB of service each month and for the last two months, I've consistently gotten less then 1-2mb. (also documented by your technicians). 1) I'd like my internet bill credited substantially to reflect this poor service. 2) I'd REALLY like to get my internet speed back! I've purchased new hardware from Suddenlink as requested, made myself available for repeated visits to my home, all of which confirm the problem is on your end, not on mine, and the last call I had with a supervisor resulted in him telling me that it would possibly be MONTHS before my service was corrected. This is absolutely unacceptable. I've been a paying customer for over four years and I expect to have this fixed in the proper manner. I'm running out of options except to contact the BBB, but I really don't want to do that either. Prior to this incident, I've ALWAYS been a huge fan of Suddenlink, but lately this customer service stinks!

March 29th: Email Response From Suddenlink

I got an email back from support 4 days later. It reads as follows:

Dear Tommy Jordan,

My name is Chris and I am the supervisor for the online department. I apologize that you have had to go through these problems with your internet service. I noticed that you have called in several times in February and March, so instead of applying a few minor credits to your account, I credited your internet for a full month. You now have a $31 credit for your internet service on your account now. If there is anything else I can do for you, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Chris

I-Care Supervisor

Ok, I was credited for a month, which I truly do appreciate, but this says nothing about actually Fixing my problem. The “anything else you can do for me” part is to FIX THE PROBLEM! Considering the speed I was currently suffering, prior to that email… it’s a good thing this wasn’t over the phone. Here’s my speed from that same time frame (below). Hint: If that Download number isn’t VERY VERY close to 8.0, I’m not happy!

 

March 26: Tech 3

It’s now the 20th or so of March and it’s been three weeks since my last technician came by to stare blankly at my problem, so I called again to check on the problem. I’ve heard nothing, been emailed nothing, not been called, nothing… So, I get technician number 3 on the 26th. He comes out and again is very nice, very courteous, very knowledgeable and basically can’t do squat.  It’s not his fault; he checked the connection and said “well sir, there’s nothing further I can do from here. This will have to have an engineer come out or someone from maintenance. I informed him that I knew he couldn’t do anything, I knew it wasn’t his fault, and I thought that Customer Support was wasting his time and mine by sending a tech out. This guy completely understood the MTS issue, agreed with it, and left without being able to further assist in getting my connection working right.

Tech Support Gets a Rest

I decided to wait it out for a few weeks at this point, assuming that maybe someone was actually working on my ticket and that they would be getting this handled sometime in the near future. I really used to LOVE Suddenlink and I just hoped that maybe some supervisor was doing as he said he would and attempting to remedy my problem. I managed to wait until about the 20th or so of April and called again. The lady on the phone pulled my ticket and told me there had been no activity on it since the last time I called. Ok.. now I’m really kinda pissed, not at her, but just in general.

So, guess what we’re doing… again? We’re getting maintenance back out here to look at the problem. I just told her what the problem was, like i told the last technician and the three previous people I’d spoken to on the phone, but customer support can only do what they’re allowed to do and all she was allowed to do was get me another maintenance guy. (Whew.. at least it’s not a new guy from tier-1 support, right?)

Not being able to scream at this nice lady, I decided to take it out on the customer support email department, hoping maybe someone would respond who knew how to actually escalate problems to the proper department.

So I sent this email:

April 16th, 8:23 PM - Email To Tech Support

Chris, (Or tech support)

Thanks for the email you sent a few weeks ago. I do appreciate the credit on my account. I’m writing tonight to see if maybe you can help me further. I’ve gone as far as I can with telephone support and don’t know where else to turn.

It’s now the 16^th of April and I started tracking this problem on the 17^th of February.  I’ve had engineers to my house, the maintenance department, various technicians, etc. One of them slipped up and told me he knew very well it was an MTC issue that had to be escalated and most likely wouldn’t get fixed for quite awhile. When I told the Suddenlink supervisor that, he wasn’t too happy, but I sat here with the engineer running the T-Bird who tested the network and he agreed…it’s nothing on my end at all.

Synopsis of the problem: I’m an IT engineer.. so I do this for a living all day long every day. It’s not Rocket Science.. it’s Torrent traffic.

I maintain a home office in addition to our main office downtown. If I work from home, as I do some days, my internet service is up around where it needs to be when I start in the morning; somewhere between 6-7 mb. (Look at the attached PNG file for clarification). Throughout the day, traffic is fine. Basically its fine because everyone is at work, school, etc.  Around dinner time each night, and I mean EVERY SINGLE NIGHT, my connection starts to suffer, most noticeably around 7 PM and later. At 8 PM, I’ll get 1.32 mb. By midnight, I’m down to less than 1 on most days.

It’s to the point now that I can’t even watch anything online, much less actually get work done after 7 PM.  (It’s pretty bad when you can’t watch Hulu because your connection times out and you’re paying for 8mb service!!!). Forget trying to FTP files to servers, perform remote service on other computers,  design web sites, or whatever else I might need to do that evening. Based on usage patterns and time of day, you and I both should be able to deduce it’s torrent related. You’ve got 200 students (or however many) on this node bit-torrenting their tails off all night after they go to bed, or when they’re playing xbox, or whatever, but its eating my bandwidth to death and there’s been absolutely NO remedy for months now.

I called tonight to check on my service ticket…. Nothing. No news, no changes, etc. I had to call because every night this week, EVERY night, about the same time of night, my network crawls to the point that I can’t even send out http requests to web sites.  I only know I’m online because Skype takes very little packet traffic to remain connected. Basically the net gets so slow I can’t load a web page… ANY web page. This continues for about ten minutes, after which the network stops altogether, the cable modem loses signal, and then it resets itself automatically and the speed is back up again for awhile, before slowing down again within the hour. No, it’s not my computer. I have two computers in the house and other net and wifi appliances and it happens across the board.

Your own engineers have verified that the copper to my building is experiencing very minimal loss, much less than expected. The SNR is fine on the copper outside, inside, and to the tap. I purchased a new cable modem through you guys because they told me it had to be that. There’s another $50.00 I didn’t need to spend. I replaced the router as well, updated the firmware, and then replaced the firmware altogether with DDWRT to get better access to my net statistics. I’ve done everything your support personnel have asked me but the problem hasn’t been fixed at all. The ONLY fix for this is to move my account (and most likely those geographically near me) to another node… at least that’s what your Suddenlink customer service supervisor told me the last time I talked to him. His words were “Well, Mr. Jordan, it’s most likely going to take months for that to happen.” What I want to know is WHY? Obviously my network node is overloaded. Ok fine, put me on a node that’s NOT overloaded so I can get the bandwidth I’m paying for. I’m paying for the next-to-highest package you have and getting HORRIBLE speeds.  To top it all off I have to deal with customer support people on the phone who think everyone is a 65-year old grandmother who’s never used the net. I get really tired of telling them there’s no need to reboot my computer just so you can verify what multiple engineers have already told us both…

What can I do, who can I talk to, where can I go to get this fixed? I even looked at dropping cable altogether after about 8 years of service because the quality is so disgustingly poor, only to find out that Embarq’s pricing is HORRIBLE for similar speed packages. I’m out of options here. Please help.

Best Regards,

Tommy Jordan

This is the attachment I sent with that email: (Click it to see it full sized)

April 21st: Response from Suddenlink

This is the response I got. Remember, at this point I’ve been reporting this issue for over two months. This is week 9 AFTER I reported it, but closer to week 13 since it actually started becoming a problem.

Tommy,

Hello, this is Chris again. When I am looking at the bandwidth graphs for your node, I noticed that there is an extreme spike of bandwidth usage in the evenings. This would explain the speed issues that you are having in the evenings. I also noticed that a work order was setup by a dispatcher in your local office for maintenance to be done; however this order still hasn't been closed out. I emailed that dispatcher, as well as the plant manager (the dispatcher's boss) to see if we can get an idea as to when this issue may be fixed. Once I receive a response from either of them, then I will notify. Unfortunately as of right now I am unable to do anything given the problem. Hopefully they are working on a resolution to this problem as we speak. In the meantime, if you have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Chris

I-Care Supervisor

PS: Chris… You’ve yet to notify me of anything… Thanks buddy!

 

April 22nd: Maintenance Returns

On the 22nd of April I get yet another Maintenance guy. I’m going to skip the part where I repeat the last five service calls. They’re starting to go something like this:

• Tommy: My internet is broke.
• Tech: Let’s reboot your cable modem
• Tommy: (thinks: Damn. I never thought of that… ok)
• Tommy (says) Ok.
• Tech: There. It still slow?
• Tommy: Yup. Why don’t you check the cable at my building.
• Tech: Ok. (returns 2 minutes later) Cable looks good.
• Tommy: Yup. Why don’t you check the cable at the tap.
• Tech: Ok. (returns 5 minutes later) Your speed sucks! That’s a problem!
• Tommy: (wondering if I’m in Dante’s 8th level of IT hell)
• Tommy: Can you call somebody to get this fixed?
• Tech: Yup. I’ll open a trouble ticket when I get back to the office.
• Tommy: Ok
• Tech: (Leaves)
• Tommy: (Bangs head on table for a few minutes before returning to my internet misery)
• Tommy: Calls to see if he opened a trouble ticket. Nope! So I opened ANOTHER ONE!

 

May 5th – Call to check Status

I called May 5th and spoke to Andrew. It should be noted that this guy has been the most sincerely awesome customer support guy I’ve ever dealt with from Suddenlink and if I knew how I’d hire him right away from you to work for us instead. He’s been very understanding and made every effort to request a team leader each time he’s seen this mile-long list of ticket notes.

I told Andrew I was calling to check on the status of my support ticket. He clicks some keys and tells me that ticket was successfully closed on the 22nd of April.

WHAT! Holy St Peter on a Stick! Who closed the ticket, I asked him.  He informed me the ticket was closed by the tech who went on the last call, on the 22nd.

I informed him that it most definitely was NOT to be closed and I had it reopened. So, guess what I got… another technician!

May 8th- Technician Number 5

So, three hours ago the technician shows up, and again we go through the whole process. I informed him that I need someone to come by here at about midnight, not 5 in the afternoon, because the problems don’t start severely until peak-time, usually after 7 or 8. He checked the connection here on the cable modem and got a rocking 12mb downstream. Ok.. let’s connect the cable modem and see what we get. I sat here with him on both my computers and my iPhone and ran speed tests on the network…

Here’s a few hours ago:

And again a few minutes ago:

Then I showed him the stats I’ve been aggregating for the last THREE months, shown below for the benefit of any Suddenlink staff who might read this page.

IP	DATE	Down (Megabits)	Up (Megabits)	Latency	Server	Miles to Server
75.110.48.108	2/17/2009 14:17	5.02	0.53	22	Washington, DC	250
75.110.48.108	2/17/2009 14:18	5.68	0.52	96	Hamilton	750
75.110.48.108	2/18/2009 19:36	1.16	0.51	141	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/19/2009 17:31	1.33	0.52	102	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/19/2009 18:18	1.99	0.52	356	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/20/2009 8:56	6.86	0.52	287	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/20/2009 8:58	7.49	0.52	286	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/22/2009 23:45	1.85	0.51	350	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/23/2009 11:51	6.71	0.52	288	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/23/2009 15:46	4.77	0.52	283	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/23/2009 21:12	1.96	0.5	450	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/24/2009 0:10	2.49	0.5	291	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/25/2009 16:39	2.49	0.52	385	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/25/2009 20:31	2.53	0.51	403	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/26/2009 18:19	3.93	0.52	291	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/26/2009 20:15	0.93	0.49	407	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/27/2009 11:09	2.93	0.52	280	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/27/2009 16:56	5.78	0.52	306	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/28/2009 2:12	6.6	0.52	309	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/28/2009 21:02	0.55	0.35	610	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/28/2009 21:04	0.69	0.35	701	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/28/2009 22:15	0.48	0.34	896	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	2/28/2009 22:19	1.19	0.51	117	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/1/2009 12:39	5.22	0.53	75	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/1/2009 23:09	1.26	0.43	153	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/2/2009 9:56	5.85	0.52	74	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/3/2009 0:20	1.91	0.51	396	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/3/2009 19:24	1.64	0.5	381	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/4/2009 20:08	0.32	0.21	566	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/6/2009 7:31	7.14	0.52	302	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/6/2009 20:11	1.32	0.46	1439	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/11/2009 14:28	2.95	0.51	85	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/17/2009 0:26	2.04	0.43	135	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/18/2009 12:23	7.09	0.52	95	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/19/2009 10:00	4.82	0.52	87	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/24/2009 23:37	0.62	0.44	116	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/25/2009 12:34	3.6	0.49	73	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/25/2009 13:23	3.7	0.48	73	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/27/2009 14:09	6.98	0.52	283	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	3/27/2009 20:28	1.48	0.48	95	Norfolk, VA	100
75.110.48.108	3/31/2009 8:08	7.87	0.53	60	Norfolk, VA	100
75.110.48.108	4/6/2009 22:56	2.16	0.41	74	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	4/10/2009 17:10	3.1	0.22	282	Norfolk, VA	100
75.110.48.108	4/16/2009 19:50	2.84	0.32	754	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 16:14	5.26	0.36	24	New York, NY	400
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 16:15	2.03	0.44	155	Morristown, TN	350
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 16:16	5.18	0.24	43	Atlanta, GA	450
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 18:06	4.71	0.43	488	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 18:10	12.09	0.5	397	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 18:11	4.86	0.49	438	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/6/2009 18:13	6.12	0.49	435	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 17:14	4.49	0.5	367	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 17:33	5.5	0.5	496	Atlanta, GA	450
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 18:21	7.45	0.51	309	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 18:22	7.77	0.51	300	Greensboro, NC	150
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 18:23	2.63	0.51	73	Morristown, TN	350
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 18:24	7.56	0.51	37	Atlanta, GA	450
75.110.48.108	5/8/2009 20:31	3.94	0.52	312	Greensboro, NC	150

As we’re talking, he tells me that he’s going to put me on PingPlotter back at the office and track my connection over the range of a couple weeks. AMAZING I said… I use the same program! Here’s your ping plotter stats from yesterday:

Those red lines… yeah those are all the times i completely lose connection to Suddenlink over the period of about five minutes… in FIVE minute between 2:01.00 and 2:05.50 I’m losing about 60% of all traffic from the modem. What else in the name of all that is holy can I possibly do to help you people remedy this problem.

What IS the problem Tommy?

The problem, for the 487th time is that the node my building is connected to has become overrun with users or at the very least with data. It’s too full. Basically there are too many people using the net and not enough speed to go around. There are two plausible scenarios to remedy this:

1. Implement traffic shaping in an extreme manner and deprioritize torrent protocols, meaning those guys who are downloading porn and movies all night cant use all the available connection the rest of us are paying to use! They won’t EVER do this and I can’t blame them. ComCast tried this and almost got sued out of existence.
2. Split the node I’m on up and put it on a less-congested CMTS at the head-end. This is a big pain in the rear for Suddenlink and I don’t envy them one bit all the headache it’s going to be to do this, however at this point, I no longer care how much of an inconvenience it is for them. I’m paying for quality service and I think three months is long enough to wait.

So, like I did with the other posts from previous customer support nightmares, I’ll keep this post updated for better or for worse and let you know how it goes.

Now, I’ve been at this for 3 hours, spewed 4,813 words, and missed half my Friday night ranting about Suddenlink. I’m going to email this link to customer service and go watch my DVR since I can’t actually get any work done because I can’t stay connected long enough!

Peace

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update 5/11/2009

Well, to be fair to Suddenlink in all this, I think it only right to post an update. After I made this blog entry I posted it on Reflector.com, the local newspaper’s web site to see if I could get the attention of Suddenlink locally. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I’m not alone in my gripes with Suddenlink over this issue. However, I think it fair to state that I didn’t always have poor service. Sometime in January it just went to absolute crap, seemingly overnight. I used to host the gaming sessions for our Tuesday night gaming group, host the 8 man conference call, run 4 messengers, check email, and game all at the same time with not one but TWO computers (since April played and Skype’d too). All of the sudden… crappy connection.  Back to the story:

One of the members on the Reflector forum made a comment that I should make my post on dslreport.com in the Suddenlink section because Suddenlink people kept an eye out on that forum, and he was nice enough to give me a link straight to it. I did, and that’s when things got interesting.

• My reflector.com post is located at: http://discussions.reflector.com/read.php?3,64954,64954#msg-64954
• The suggestion to post on DSLreports.com is: http://discussions.reflector.com/read.php?3,64954,65025#msg-65025
• And the DSLReports.com post is here: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22368793-Suddenlink-Broken-for-3-Months-Greenville-NC

If you’ve read the comments to this post, you’ll see that I did indeed get the attention I was looking for. A gentleman by the name of Pete Abel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications was kind enough to comment and inform me of his intention to help out. To his credit, he’s still waiting on a response from me as I only got the email this afternoon and haven’t had time to write him yet. I’ll do that later tonight.

Out of the blue tonight a Suddenlink technician shows up at my house and asks if he can fix my Internet problems. Well, not knowing what else to say I said SURE.. c’mon in!  He informed me that I started experiencing T3 and T4 errors on the 8th of May and that’s when my problem started. I courteously informed him that no, my problems did NOT start on the 8th. I called tech support and asked Andrew to put me on PingPlotter on the 8th of may. THAT is why he was seeing no errors before that… because they weren’t tracking my modem before I asked them to. I never did get him to understand this. I think he thinks I’m just an idiot with a little lingo under my belt. Basically the T3 and T4 errors on my modem mean that my cable modem is losing packets. The modem has a processor that’s supposed to account for that, which it can do when there is only a small amount of data lost. This would be the T1, T2 level. When it gets to T3/T4 it means the modem is losing so much data that it can’t put the data stream back together and it just has to reset itself. This explains my sudden dying and then amazing return speeds I’ve been experiencing. It also explains why it starts cycling again 15 minutes later every night all night.

1. Modem reboots and starts processing packets.
2. T1/T2 errors in the data stream are being self corrected by modem.
3. Packet loss gets to be too much… T3/T4 errors start happening.
4. Modem can’t take it.. takes a nose dive and resets.
5. Repeat Steps 1-4 until I want to bang my head on a table for three months.

Amidst the checking of my wiring the technician informs me of the Suddenlink internal speed test site, which is the one we’re “supposed” to use. Well, I’d like to make it known that no tech I’ve ever spoke to even KNOWS about this internal speed test site. I’m pretty sure you can call Suddenlink customer service and ask for the Speed test site and they’ll tell you www.speakeasylcom (which we all know DOES fluff it’s ratings!)

Anyway, for those of you who Do want to use it, you can find it here:

Suddenlink Official Speedtest Server

Like most technicians, be bashed a little on my usage of speedtest.net, with the standard “they’re a commercial site trying to make ad-revenue so they fluff their statistics. They’re not accurate.” Rather than argue the point with him I just let him proceed to do his job, which he set right to pretty quickly. When I explained that suddenlink recommended speakeasy.net he told me the same thing about them. What’s the deal with techs hating speedtest sites.

So, he cut a new RG-59 coax cable for my cable modem and tested it out. We got crappy connection still… about 2.91mbits at 6 PM in the afternoon. So he plugged in his laptop and checked it on his side. I never saw what the results were, but the basic consensus was that we hadn’t replaced my coax cables the first five times I had techs out. For the record, we DID replace my cables before but another technician had swapped them back out again later and we never swapped them back.

Once we were all completed and all his tests were done, we checked it again on my laptop. I didn’t get the records for proof because the Suddenlink site has a crappy reporting process, but we landed 2.92 the first time, 3.3 the next time, then 5.1. According to the technician I’m losing 20% of my signal because I’m testing via wi-fi. (Pardon me, but I call bullshit.) I’m eleven feet direct line of sight from a 70 milliwatt antenna, not the standard 30mw crap that comes off the shelf. I reflashed the router to DDWRT a few months ago to try to correct this issue already. Basically my router is putting out twice the antenna power it’s supposed to be. I can pick up a strong signal from the pool 150 feet away through a building! It’s NOT my wireless signal. Let’s just assume that if we can technologically invent 3G and 4G wireless networks that deliver 5 megs to my phone, that my wireless router technology is sufficient to broadcast eleven feet… ok?

So, now what? I have no idea. I’m definitely going to email Mr. Pete Abel and see what he can do to correct this issue because here is what I got out of the guy who came by tonight:

• Speedtest servers can’t be used because they’re never right and only suddenlink’s internal server is correct, but customer support doesn’t know the address of that one so you can’t ever get the url (until now, you’re welcome very much).
• Wi-Fi signals suck and you can’t expect to get a signal even when you’re within 11’LOS of your router.
• If I’m paying for 8MB and consistently get 4, that’s all I’m supposed to get. (Not kidding. He said that…)

Let me tell you what I think:

I think I get a freakin’ bill for 8mb of service! I want 8mb of service guaranteed or else I want you to change the damned name to 4mb like it used to be and take the price back down! 7.97? ok. 7.55? ok. Less then 7 Consistently? NOT OK. I asked him tonight if I could upgrade to the 12 mb service. Sure! So, if I upgrade to 12, what do I get?

8 MB plan with 4mb consistent to meet the TOS standards = 50% of what I’m paying for? So it follows that:

12mb plan with 50% consistent would equal 6mb using the same billing plan. So if I DO upgrade to 12, I get 6? WAIT A DAMNED MINUTE! I’m ALREADY PAYING FOR 8 that I can’t get NOW!

Grrr.. maybe Mr. Pete can help. Here’s hopin!

PS: RIGHT now I’m getting:

And here are my stats for the last 24 hours in case Suddenlink needs to see them:

More updates to follow…

 

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