Review by (hidden by request)
Posted: 131 days ago
(review was emailed from domain scribendi.com)
 N7M
 Contract price not specified.
 "Reasonably inexpensive, stable connection"
 "Tech support is not too hot for questions requiring a solution beyond \"
 "Very slow connections to some of the most popular sites, due to a snarfu between Cogeco and Akamai"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I've been given the run-around by Cogeco technical support for over a week,
and have had my fill of "works for me" and "nothing we can do about it" so
here's the issue:
Certain sites have been loading really slowly, especially at peak times. By
slowly, I mean 5-10 minutes to render a page, but only on certain sites,
like Facebook and CBC. All other sites are fine, and bandwidth is a steady
8M.
The common factor, and this is the truly priceless bit, it that the sites
that are very slow are those hosted on Akamai's EdgeSuite CDN, which are
supposed to be accelerated by being served from servers Akamai has placed
within Cogeco's network.
There are four of these servers, and they all ping fine, but HTTP requests
stall and time out all over the place. My guess is that they are woefully
underpowered for the load placed upon them, or are misconfigured. Cogeco
consistently deny that this is the case.
The problem can be overcome by using an alternative DNS service, like
OpenDNS or DNSAdvantage, so that requests are routed to a different set of
Akamai servers. However, those services don't give proper NXDOMAIN answers,
and don't refuse non-local requests, which then breaks DNS resolution over
Windows VPN connections due to an unpatched bug in Windows XP [kb311218].
Using a centralized DNS system also totally defeats the purpose of Akamai's
CDN, and I need to use VPNs regularly because I'm a sysadmin, so the only
real answer is for Akamai and Cogeco to get their act together. And quickly.
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