Comments on: How-To: The 1-2-3 Method Of Troubleshooting Your Broadband http://www.pcmech.com/article/how-to-the-1-2-3-method-of-troubleshooting-your-broadband/ Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:17:25 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 By: Steve Stone http://www.pcmech.com/article/how-to-the-1-2-3-method-of-troubleshooting-your-broadband/comment-page-1/#comment-11527 Steve Stone Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:31:06 +0000 http://www.pcmech.com/article/how-to-the-1-2-3-method-of-troubleshooting-your-broadband/#comment-11527 Home networking and internet connection issues are not always as clean a PD as you describe. A few weeks ago a thunderstorm rolled thru my area. The lights flickered a few times and my ADSL connection stopped working. I wasn't too concerned. My UPS was doing a good job of managing the power issues. After a few hours I still did not have an internet connection. Looking at the Netgear DG834G admin pages everything looked normal. The ADSL connection was up. The 8 PC's on my home network, wired and wireless, could talk and share files with each other, but no Internet. I tried calling my ISP help desk. They refused to work with me until I took the Netgear router out of the loop and reinstalled the 3COM 812 router they provided me in the year 2000. I pulled the beast out of a dusty box in the garage, plugged it in and had similar results, no internet.. called the ISP help desk again.. they would now work with me. They did some diags on their end and claimed my connection was resetting every two seconds, claimed it was a line problem, wanted to know if I wanted to purchase their in home wire maintenance protection program (I refused), and then said they would send a tech out to my home between 1 and 5 pm the next day. I broke out the 56k dial up modem. Noticed the connect speed was half of what I would usually get, about 22kbps. I replaced the ADSL line filter/splitter and was rewarded with a 48kbps connect rate. The next morning I VPN'd into work on dial up on my laptop and screwed around some more with ADSL on my personal tower. At 11:30 AM my ADSL connection came back up, no warning. I swapped out the 3com 812 router for the Netgear (both these rigs have the ADSL modem built into the router). The Netgear connected to my ISP but I still could not talk to the Internet thru it with my PC. I swapped the 3COM router back in, everything worked, I assumed the Netgear router and the ADSL line filter splitter was cooked by a surge that came in the phone line that was not handled by the lightning protection at the demarc. For some reason the surge suppression for phone lines built into the UPS cannot be used because it degrades the ADSL signal and cancels out callerid on the voice side of the line. At 1:30PM the tech rolled into the driveway. I told him everything was working and thanked him. He said he did absolutely nothing and would write it off as no trouble found. I bought another Netgear DG834G on eBay for $5 plus shipping. Another day in paradise. Home networking and internet connection issues are not always as clean a PD as you describe.
A few weeks ago a thunderstorm rolled thru my area. The lights flickered a few times and my ADSL connection stopped working. I wasn’t too concerned. My UPS was doing a good job of managing the power issues. After a few hours I still did not have an internet connection. Looking at the Netgear DG834G admin pages everything looked normal. The ADSL connection was up. The 8 PC’s on my home network, wired and wireless, could talk and share files with each other, but no Internet. I tried calling my ISP help desk. They refused to work with me until I took the Netgear router out of the loop and reinstalled the 3COM 812 router they provided me in the year 2000. I pulled the beast out of a dusty box in the garage, plugged it in and had similar results, no internet.. called the ISP help desk again.. they would now work with me. They did some diags on their end and claimed my connection was resetting every two seconds, claimed it was a line problem, wanted to know if I wanted to purchase their in home wire maintenance protection program (I refused), and then said they would send a tech out to my home between 1 and 5 pm the next day. I broke out the 56k dial up modem. Noticed the connect speed was half of what I would usually get, about 22kbps. I replaced the ADSL line filter/splitter and was rewarded with a 48kbps connect rate. The next morning I VPN’d into work on dial up on my laptop and screwed around some more with ADSL on my personal tower. At 11:30 AM my ADSL connection came back up, no warning. I swapped out the 3com 812 router for the Netgear (both these rigs have the ADSL modem built into the router). The Netgear connected to my ISP but I still could not talk to the Internet thru it with my PC. I swapped the 3COM router back in, everything worked, I assumed the Netgear router and the ADSL line filter splitter was cooked by a surge that came in the phone line that was not handled by the lightning protection at the demarc. For some reason the surge suppression for phone lines built into the UPS cannot be used because it degrades the ADSL signal and cancels out callerid on the voice side of the line. At 1:30PM the tech rolled into the driveway. I told him everything was working and thanked him. He said he did absolutely nothing and would write it off as no trouble found. I bought another Netgear DG834G on eBay for $5 plus shipping. Another day in paradise.

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