My First Experience with Covad Support
I was hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with Covad support this soon, but stuff happens.
Earlier this evening, I had switched my MacBook over to the Covad T1. I hadn’t noticed any problems with it earlier in the evening, though when I got back to the computer after having completed the evening’s family activities, I noticed that things weren’t peachy. Things were “stuttering” and pausing. I went through my troubleshooting steps and discovered that the next-hop away from my T1 router was dropping packets. Not consistently, but it was dropping stuff. I poked around on the Cisco T1 router and didn’t see any obvious interface errors, so I presume it’s an IP-layer problem and not something wrong with the T1 circuit itself.
I dug up Covad’s technical support number and gave them a call. Wait time was very minimal, the tech took my information, we went through some troubleshooting steps, waited for the Cisco to reboot, and at the end of the day, we can both see the occasional packet loss but we don’t know why. Trouble ticket opened, they are monitoring the situation as will I, though I will switch the Mac back over to the cable modem for the rest of the evening.
The tech was courteous and he seemed to understand enough to know there was an issue. All in all, a good first experience, even if there is a service issue. Good phone support makes all the difference when things are going sideways.
