Anyone out there who lives east of the Mississippi river, has AT&T/Bellsouth and has suffered from annoying packet loss to The Planet over the past few days? It is enough to make remote desktop control almost unusable at times and forget about file transfers.

--------------Details and ranting below--------------

I know it is AT&T because I never leave AT&T's network since my ISP is AT&T.
I get packet loss to my servers within H2, DLLSTX4 and DLLSTX5 but I don't get packet loss from server to server within The Planet.

I have this issue where I live and a neighboring city in AL which uses a different AT&T central office.
When the work weeks starts back, I will test from TN AT&T connections and see if the issue exists in a different state.

I've been watching Comcast too and although it is much more stable, there are still times where I drop about two or three ICMP packets at once to my H2 server.
Comcast is a direct connect to H2 also.

Just wondering. Every time I have this issue, I call AT&T and I get the same "we are not having any issues in your area" stupid answer.
I had them out testing my lines a few weeks ago and they said "there is not an issue."
Issues like this exist for residential DSL and business T-1 lines within a 15 mile radius that I have tested (both voice and data).

It gets even better when AT&T is the only option!

Yeah, it is crap in the former Bellsouth territory. Since last Wednesday here in Knoxville, there have been massive, intermittent outages that have gone completely unacknowleged. Several of my clients have been completely unable to do simple things like check their in-network mail (bellsouth.net & att.net), and yet, "There is no outage."

And sure, there have been some minor, intermittent net ripples, but nothing that's seriously inhibited Comcast save the mass outage last weekend that was fixed within an hour...

Bellsouth has always been that way... "No, there is no problem, no there is no outage" and proceed to blame someone else, something else. It's always anything but them. I went 'round and 'round with them so often I stopped using them at all. It's a shame that even when we go to a national CLEC, Bellsouth still gets to put in the circuit...

I'm on comcast here in Memphis and haven't had any problems to my Dallas servers.

One thing that suprised me though is my ping from Memphis - Dallas while I'm on comcast is about 19ms while if I go to a friends place the ping to the server is in the 50's - 60-'s.

What's funny, on the Bellsouth T1 lines, when you call AT&T to report an outage they refuse to help you and suggest that we call Bellsouth. WTH right? According to them, for tech support purposes, AT&T and Bellsouth are still seperate (at least in our area).
Then, after the ticket gets put in, I get a call from a tech asking how I (the customer) submitted a ticket without going through customer service or a service tech (known as end user submitted tickets; no such thing btw).
Happens every time.
Absolute nightmare. I don't know how they can get away with this.
Funny thing is, they say it is my "upstream provider" even though I never leave AT&T's network.
Most of my issues didn't start until AT&T came into the picture anyways.

19ms is great.
Our local comcast runs about 30ms-40ms during the day which is still good.

I am already up to about 20ms or higher (first hop) to my nearby DSLAM (which is actually inside the central office that I am close too) and I have Bellsouth ADSL 6.0 extreme service.
I will be positive and admit, however, AT&T network carries me from the central office to Texas (when the lines are working) with an ending total of about 60ms - 70ms or so. Even that isn't too bad.

Oh well, I am just rambling. Not like I can do anything about it.
They will eventually fix the issue because it hasn't been this bad for awhile.
They should have experience by now and know exactly what to do.

*nod* Welcome to the real world, eh? That's Bellsouth for ya... What you're experiencing is exactly why it's a shame that we can't get a CLEC to install a circuit... They try every way in the world to pawn off the problem to someone else, and all out refuse to fix anything.

They've adopted a "let's screw the parent company" mentality nearly as bad as MCI did in the 90's during the British Telecom thing... MCI had a great Internet network, but they never wanted to pay for the use of the telecomm infrastructure they took advantage of. When it came time that they had to start paying again, they tried to sell out, and immediately began to scuttle the company, and worked very hard against itself to make sure that whoever bought it would inherit a stinking mess. Fortunately, BT had the brains --- and balls --- to realize what was going on and pulled out of the deal... But poor Worldcom got stuck with it. I actually felt sorry for Worldcom, having worked for both MCI and BT during all that crap...