[luau] Road Runner Vs. DSL revisited

[John S. Johnson]

I have a question that, although not Linux-specific, is one that generated a lot of discussion in this forum before. I have been a faithful user of Oceanic Road Runner since the beginning. In the old days you had to sign up for basic cable and road runner together for a total of about $50 to $60. DSL is currently $39.99 a month with a special promo for even lower for the first half-year, with hopes of even lower rates in the future. This all sounds good, but the proof is in the pudding. The two main issues for me are downtime and speed of connection. In my experience, Oceanic these days seems plagued with downtime problems. Every once in a while I will get booted for 5 to 10 minutes with no explanations. The speed, though, is good. I want to see how DSL stacks up. While checking my bill today I was given the DSL pitch and I bit. I have a 30-day trial period and decided to take them up on it. What I would like to do, though, is to somehow compare the two services side-by-side for my area(home). I was wondering if there were any nifty network tools available to measure connection downtime and connection speed. I have heard of connection speed analyzers before, but never anything that would check connection downtime. I would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you!

--John Johnson