I have now accumulated four and a half days of data, and my internet connection has been either unusable (so slow that web pages time out while loading) or completely non-existant (ping refused because of no connection) for 41.34% of the time. Even in Mexico I suspect that this is non-optimal performance.

I got lucky yesterday. I consolidated the most recent 40 hours of data onto four pages, multi-columnized with six hundred ping records per page, all conditionally formatted to color-code the four different statuses of connectivity: "Normal", "Slow", "Non-Functional", and "No Connection". I took this to my ISP which is normally a useless operation because it is staffed only by two women whose combined English vocabulary is about 10 words (note: that is MY problem, not theirs. I live in THEIR country, and I damn well better learn THEIR language if I want to communicate!) and whose total technical expertise is to tell a client if they owe money and if so, how much. But as I said, I got lucky. Their one and only English-speaking technician happened to be in the office between service calls, and I was able to speak with him. He was very impressed with my colorful printout, and 90 minutes later he was ringing my doorbell. He thought that he and his partner had found a damaged cable on the utility pole by my house and fixed the problem, but I was skeptical. As it turned out, justifiably so. So they came inside, and they hooked up some kind of signal meter to the raw cable, checked all my connections (splitter/TV/computer/modem/router), and for no really good reason the internet came back. Hmmmm... today they are going to bring me a replacement cable modem, but I think they are just taking random shots at fixing the problem. The big news, however, is that the English-speaking tech gave me his personal cell phone number and told me to call him any time, night or day, if I were having internet problems. Now that is what I call service.

We'll just have to wait and see how it goes...

Edit: I forgot to mention that after the techs left yesterday afternoon, I had internet for about five hours, then it quit again for four hours, returning on-line at six minutes past midnight.

tanstaafl.