Gray's blog

Alright, I’m fed up with this god damn service!

I have called ‘tech support’ many times and heard all kinds of crazy stories & ideas on how to fix my connection issues including but not limited to:

- Duct tape modem to window
- ‘Your modem is connecting to a tower across the lake when your surrounded by them’..
- ‘We know it’s slow’
- Youtube is not considered ‘normal internet use’

This bullshit is coming from a company that pitches ‘go beyond 3g’ on their billboards. If anyone wants proof t-mobile’s 3g on a wifi tether is faster then this feel free to drop a comment, but rest assured it kills it.

Clearwire reps/tech support also admit that it is slow and much slower then T-Mobile’s 3g. They make claims about Wi-Max but I doubt that service will be better. Not to mention it hasn’t rolled out yet.

Let’s just see the average day on clearwire’s speedtest:

Which is about 1/3 the speed of decent dial up. Ugh.

This is with 5 out of 5 bars on the modem by the way. And this is on a day when the internet service itself actually works, outages are regular occurrences. I’m also on my second modem, due to the other one completely failing to connect _at_all_ after several months of use.

I have NEVER received the ‘1.5′ mbps of speed my service plan dictates. Yesterday, a 10mb download ended up taking 2 hours.

This is, without a doubt, the worst internet service I’ve ever used.

Edit:

So I decided to speedtest T-Mobile’s 3g to compare. A couple things first:

- Contrary to the image, I am not in kansas.
- The ping time went down about 200ms on average after I did this test.
- This is the WORST it has ever been (Tethered 3g), although it still kills clearwire it’s not SUPER fast.

The proof is in the pudding here.

Edit Again:

So about a day after posting this (19 hours), my internet speed suddenly increased beyond anything it has before. Ever in 2 years of having it:

I also noticed the amount of bars went from 5 to 3, and the speed increased significantly. Meaning the tower I was connected to changed, although the positioning of the modem did not. I find it a bit odd that the time I get the fastest internet I have had comes a day after posting this, but that’s a bit I’m not going to touch on.

Ciao,
Gray

After a while of running this music DB, and noticing lag spikes and slowdowns due to poor, old coding, I made a decision. It’s rewrite time.

Now I know I’ve been saying that forever, but this time Axcid changes itself from a database to a search engine. I’ve engineered a new storage format / searchable database that can store music data, literally 50 times as fast as before. Queries that once took 50 seconds now take 20 milliseconds.

The new system will be much more scalable. Work starting with multiple servers, splitting the ‘powerhouse’ load (streaming, content checking, ‘heavy lifting’), from the database load (searching, indexing, database handling).

The XML api’s will also be re engineered. They will use a better / more standard format.

There will also be many new features, including album indexing, better art retrieval, users / sessions & playlists. The software version will be rebuilt to a more solid, complete application.

We’re moving out of the prototype days, and into the real software days. The beginning was fun, but it’s time to buckle down and launch a real music service.