Ever have trouble connecting to the Net?

Weeks go by and my Internet connection works like a dream. Then one day – like this morning – it takes ages to obtain a connection. And I never know why.
Spare a thought then for the tens of million in the Middle East and Asia who are having trouble now connecting to the Net because of a faulty undersea cable somewhere on the bottom of the Mediterranean. More information here.


One Comment

  • Richard Leyton

    I’m suspicious of service providers who are not open about the problems they face. Frequently they’re unavoidable, or not their fault (BT runs the network infrastructure), so they should shouldn’t be hiding information that might be useful.
    My ADSL provider has a very useful website (and RSS feed), so I can be aware of issues/problems that might affect me:
    http://status.zensupport.co.uk/
    And the company I use to colocate my server does similar:
    http://www.xcalibre.co.uk/status/status.php
    I can recommend them both 🙂 – Of course, an outage may mean I can’t check the website, but at least I can find out what happened after the event. Plus I do have a telephone number for them both in my address book 🙂
    With ADSL one of the things to remember is that sometimes your ADSL router can have it’s connection dropped, so switching it off for a few seconds then back on again can often fix the problem (A bit like a Windows PC! 😉 as it’ll reconnect.
    So I’d suggest, if you find this sort of problem happens and you never know why, you should give serious thought to changing your ISP. Maybe they’ll eventually take the hint!