My Internet Situation

so here's the deal with my internet situation.  feel free to skip down to after the line break if you've already heard the first part of the story.

- starting around the first week of september, my upload speed has gone to 0 during various times of day
- i used to have normal speeds the rest of the day for the first 2 weeks of september
- since mid-september, i haven't had fast enough speeds to stream at any time of day
- normally i get 6.5 Mb/s upload, now i peak at around 1.5 Mb/s
- sometimes my upload goes to literally 0, in which case i can't even connect to websites
- rarely download is also affected, but it's usually only upload

because my upload speed is unusable, this has affected me in a couple ways:

first, i have been working from home since the end of august.  because my upload speed is so bad, i'm unable to share my desktop.  during the times when my upload goes to literally 0, i can't even connect or stay connected to VPN on my work laptop, meaning i literally can't do anything.

i don't have permission to work at home, and i mentally can't go into the office, especially with all the extra stress i've been dealing with due to this unusable internet lately.  but if i can't work from home due to these problems, it means i'm going to be forced to go into the office or lose my job, which would cause more stress at this point.

second, i obviously can't stream happily with this connection.  i said before that my peak upload speed is 1.5Mb/s, and it usually hovers between 1.2 and 1.5.  does this mean i can stream 1000 bitrate?  no, in fact i even drop frames at 200 bitrate because it's just not stable at all.  if i want to have any kind of quality that makes taiko watchable then i can't stream it at all.  this is making me more bored and causing me to get involved in other questionable things i wanted to stay out of, like speedrunning pokemon, which again, causes more stress to me than i deserve.

before my internet started having these problems, i was at a point in my life where i literally cared about nothing in life other than my stream.  now 6 weeks later, i have no idea what i care about anymore since i can't stream.  i want to get back to streaming as soon as possible, to get back to doing the thing i enjoy in a way that i enjoy, rather than having to force streaming things i dislike on a bad connection where i am upset with my internet and the stream quality most of the time.

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so here are the issues:

currently this problem is affecting the entire community at my apartment complex, and because of how long it's been ongoing, i'm losing faith that the problem will ever be fixed.  but because even the leasing office staff are having problems doing their work for the past week, the internet problem is gonna have to get fixed soon.  but if it takes another 4 weeks to fix it, i'm going to be even more unhappy for that period of time, deal with even more stress and possible depression, and possibly lose my job because of it all.

i mentioned last weekend about switching internet providers if my speeds weren't back to normal by this weekend, and that seems like it would fix the problem, but it's not as easy as it seems.  time warner would cost me about $75 a month after fees for slower upload speed than i'm currently getting for $50.  i'm fairly confident that i can sell out to raise this extra $25 a month, but there's a problem.  i learned today that time warner doesn't even service my apartment complex.  so even if i wanted to switch to time warner and get their fastest plan which is 5 Mb/s upload, i couldn't because time warner is just not an option here.

the only other internet provider that services my apartment complex is cincinnati bell, and they're actually an amazing ISP from what i've heard.  because they're not comcast or time warner, they actually have pretty good support, and they offer amazing speeds for much more reasonable prices than any of the big compaines.  the only problem?  at my complex the fastest speeds they can offer are 30/3 for $45 a month, meaning their 3 Mb/s upload is less than half of what i would be getting if i get my normal speeds back here.

the complicated part is that when i signed up for this internet plan, the advertised speeds were 20/3.  then at some point they changed the advertised speeds to a much lower amount, and not even the people in my leasing office noticed.  it was obviously wrong because i didn't have any decrease in speed, and i'm already getting higher speed than what i was originally supposed to get.  so it's not really fair to say "i should be getting 26/6.5 speeds" because i have no idea what speeds i really should be getting here.

i should also mention that i'm going to file paperwork today through my apartment complex to get a refund on my last month's internet bill due to all the issues, this would do the same thing as my previous plan to not pay my next month's bill, so we're all good there.

i have no idea whether i should risk switching to cincinnati bell or tough it out with my current ISP until things get fixed.  i can stream on 30/3 if that 3 Mb/s upload is stable.  i could also end up getting something like 6.5 Mb/s upload again like i'm getting with my current plan.  but that's the thing, there's no way to know, and if their internet ends up also not being good enough, then i switched for nothing, and it would be difficult to switch back because i'm not getting it directly through my apartment complex anymore.

i really don't know what i should do so some advice would be greatly appreciated.