Lousy Telmex Internet Connections

[kasugie]

4 things going on.....

(1) The relatively old copper infrastructure (in terms of internet time) is literally and figuratively rusting away. Guanajuato's connection to the internet backbone is way-over-capacity as well. Last year Telmex actually layed fiber optic internet trunks throughout the city, with the intention to upgrade everyone to a more reliable, higher capacity service. La Presa was intended to be a test case for connections. But, connecting homes even in a relatively modern neighborhood has proven to be too troublesome. So, Telmex abandoned this "proyecto" for the time being, and is now connecting Marfil and the outlying fraccionamientos instead - "low hanging fruit" from a telecom engineering perspective. Sucks to us us.

(2) I believe one of their trunks passes along Sangre de Cristo. Temporary moves seem to be cutting off service. Sucks to be us.

(3) Telmex has adopted Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T's policy towards quality of service towards Skype, Netflix, and other 3rd party streaming services. Unless they pay for a service level agreement, these services get low priority treatment on their backbone routers. It's a complicated business, as Netflix and other streaming services have enlisted other 3rd party cloud/edge services to optimize their streaming everywhere in the cloud. But, these cloud services, (who've been paid billions of dollars) then flood the ultimate internet service providers, who are rightfully (and legally) pissed that they're not cut into these deals. Sometimes (in the case of Skype), they go out of their way to disrupt the service. Other times, they simply give these services low priority on their backbone routers and switches. Pretty well sums up the reason Netflix capitulated to Comcast a couple of weeks ago.

(4) Telmex has taken this one step further. I'm pretty well convinced they are siphoning off a portion of everyone's promised (but not guaranteed) bandwidth to support their new Claro video streaming service. Had they done this AFTER deploying fiber optic internet service to everyone in Guanajuato, very few would have noticed. But, given everyone's service is broken, it simply makes a bad situation worse. Sucks to be us.

Bottom line is we're screwed. 4G wireless internet is a viable alternative and provides similar bandwidth to what Telmex is offering with fiber optic service. However, Telcel, Movistar, Nextel, and iUSACELL have no plans to deploy this service in Guanajuato anytime soon.