The Crawl

It happens every frickin’ month, on the first business day of the month, like clockwork. My ‘net connection slows to a crawl, and I mean a crawl: I get a maximum through-put of about 18 Kbps, or about half of what a normal dial-up connection gives you. Oftentimes it’s even slower than that, and sometimes it stops altogether for a few minutes. I normally get about 360 Kbps, which about average for a 384 Kbps connection when you factor in overhead. The slow-down lasts anywhere from eight to ten hours, sometimes it can be quite a bit longer.

I think I know what’s going on. Portales, a small burg with 12,000 folks, served by exactly one telecom company (yep, there’s no competition), probably has limited connectivity to the outside world. I’d be surprised if Yucca Telecom has more than a couple of OC-24s connecting P-Town to the nearest POP node. So, on the first day of the month the town’s three banks and assorted other businesses are probably sending huge month-end batch files to higher headquarters, sucking up ALL the available bandwidth out of town. That’s my theory, anyway.

Everything is back to normal today. Yesterday I couldn’t even get a 32 Kbps internet radio stream to play without constant buffering; surfing was sloooow, too. Today I’m surfing the ‘net and listening to a 128 Kbps audio stream with no drop-outs. This explains why I had no “Song of the Day” yesterday. I’ll have one later today, when the mood strikes me. The leading candidate at the moment is ZZ Top’s “Heard it on the X,” but there will probably be much more worthy songs as the day progresses. Like Neil Young's "Comes a Time," playing right now.

I’m sure all y’all are just sitting there with baited breath, right? Sure you are.