Tuesday morning, my DSL modem failed - the fourth light - "INTERNET" - would not come on, and I had no online ability. Had too short a time at lunch Tuesday to get resolution, but got off work early today (for Turkey Day weekend) and called CenturyLink again. I was PO'd, and demanding a new DSL box. But, I went ahead and let "Lakeisha" talk me thru another round of checks. AHA! Back online! Seems my "Provisioning" was somehow messed up and they 'rebuilt it' - I wonder if she meant a 'profile'....... But the wee blackbox with the flashy lights seems happy now....... And she sounded American too (black, actually)..... so maybe I wasn't bounced all the way to Mumbai......
My DSL and router want reset every now and then, their poor little brains are easily confused. They have a procedure to go thru for diagnosis, but it always comes back as "confused." Basically, the fix is to pull the plugs on the power supplies, wait a while (a minute or two) and plug them back in. After a bit, sometimes several minutes, they recover consciousness. I've saved several phone calls that way.
Same with my broadband connection. At least twice a month the service goes out for about 4 to 6 hours while they update the local equipment...it's annoying. Most times in between, the service will go out for a few minutes and come back after a bit. Even unplugging my equipment and resetting won't help, but occasionally I get surprised when its just my own router on the fritz. When I had Time Warner cable in Florida, I had 100% uptime for 2 years straight, even during bad storms. Of course, some years we had hurricanes, but that's understandable.
I'm struggling with my little hometown cable internet these days. I have the Gold package and get 5mbs down and 1mb up. Far cry from my 30 mb down and 15 up a few months ago when I lived within 7 miles of a Google server farm. I haven't had any problems yet but they needed to come in and do all sorts of modem and router programming to get it to work the first time.
I guess I'm the lucky one here..........I live right across from our small towns library and my wifi in my Laptop picks up the signal quite fine, so I have a free t-1 connection.......but I'm not bragging or anything.
The only internet service I have ever had, other than dial up, is satellite. Like cell phones it is fickle and drops the signal sometimes. But I have used it in the boonies of Okla, the Bayous of Louisiana, the scubs of the Rio Grande Valley, to the middle of the Sahara and Arabian Deserts. So guess I shouldn't complain too much.
My DSL has been pretty good, except for about one week a month ago. Every morning I had to unplug the power and plug it back it to allow it to "reset". Thought maybe it was because I just hooked up my Blu-Ray player to my internal network and it was causing some sort of usage problems. But it all resolved itself, I no longer have to do resets. Infact, I think until that little episode I hadn't had a power cycle on my DSL modem in almost a year.