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How often does your Internet access fail?

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by mushroom_mover

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It seems my Internet access at home fails pretty frequently. I would say it is down at least 5 times a year or so, and when it is down it can be out for several hours. It is out at the moment in fact.

I don't want to trash the ISPs - just wondering what the typical downtime per year people see with various technologies - DSL, Cable, T1?

I have noticed that often when the Internet is down, it is only the DNS service which is down. For example, you can still ping sites as long as you know the specific IP address. Anybody else notice this?

Thanks in advance for any replies...

11 replies

by ---tk---

LOL... my connection use to go out 4+ times a month, for the first three months... I started to lay into them, eventually they got it fixed... When ever my connection was down it was totally down, the modem couldn't even reach their switch.

I use Time Warner Cable, they are good most of the time. I love my speeds, 15 Megs/s down is a little excessive... but for some reason I can never have enough bandwidth.. :)
**sigh** if only I could tap into the OC3 ring around cincy...

by mushroom_mover

Thanks -TK- and everyone else who replied.

Not to be self serving, but if your 15Mbps from Time Warner cable is not enough, you might want to consider adding in more bandwidth through bonding. Typically DSL seems to cheapest in terms of $/(bit/sec), so you might consider adding in one or two DSL lines if you can afford it. Multiple providers also means more reliability. :-)

As a caveat, this might make more sense for a business rather than an individual.

If you are interested in learning more, please search for "Mushroom Networks"

May your future have mushrooms in it... :-)

by jamesrl

I lose my connection about once a month. I notice it during online gaming.

But rebooting the DSL modem and rebooting the PC usually clear it right up.

I only lose the ability to connect maybe once a year, for an hour or so.

James

by mjd420nova

My cable internet has not been down for over a year. Three weeks ago I had a loss of power in the neighborhood that was large enough that it also took down the gateway for one hour, but I don't consider that an outage on the part of the ISP. It was caused by a traffic accident that took down a 32KV feeder line for the city and affected close to 50,000 residents and around 20 square miles. I know this as I have a UPS for my home server and one desktop unit which included the cable modem.

by tink!

He says it goes out all the time. (I take that statement with a grain of salt as when I'm home it only goes down once in a while.)

And by "down" I simply means it loses sync just long enough to log us out of our online game, but is right back up by the time our game's login screen is back on. This occurs approx 3 times a week or so.

Once in a while (like once or twice month) it will go down and stay down. Then I just have to cold boot the DSL modem and we're good to go again.

by ontheropes

I've probably had it for seven or eight years now. They've never been down for us. Of course we've had outages caused by the weather but I don't count that as being the same thing as my ISP being down.

by ontheropes

Because I was talking about it, we had a weather outage last night from about 2130 until 0830 this morning. Ice build-up on the dish put us out. It took a tall, shaky stepladder and a can of deicer to get us back online.

by jackofalltech

I've had Cox cable and high-speed internet at home for over ten years now and I have not had one interruption in all that time except for scheduled maintenance.

BTW - If you've seen the commercials that say "crazy fast", they mean it. It's expensive but I can download a DVD ISO in under 10 minutes.

by jck

sometimes it's within my ISP, sometimes it's with their trunk

needless to say, i would like 100% reliability. but, i'm never gonna get that. companies don't pride themselves on quality of service anymore.

by jaqui

I have been offline for a total of 48 hours.

from hardware failures.

My internet access provider wasn't a problem, only the danged dsl modem dieing. The dialup access still worked.

by boxfiddler Hot topic

it went down every couple months, and the outage would be intermittent for days.

I moved to ATT U-Verse about 6 (?) months ago and it hasn't been down yet. I had a problem once, but that was because I knocked the wire on the gateway.

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