Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with isp

Need. Internet. Back.

Beardman — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:57:33 -0800

Why can't I connect to the internet anymore? Is customer service giving me a plausible explanation? Our home internet connection has been down all weekend. We use a new and speedy 24" iMac. When we try to connect to PPPoE, it just says "Connecting...Connecting...Connecting" and finally says that it can't connect to the server. No amount of power cycles and restarts make a difference. This has happened once before, a few months ago, and changing the access password with the ISP solved the problem (until Friday).

Our apartment sucks and there is only one working phone jack, which is in an inconvenient location. Thus, we run a 15 foot phone cord from it to a normal telephone cord splitter, from which a 10 foot (filtered) telephone cord goes to the modem, and a second cord goes to our telephone.

Yesterday, my ISP's customer service guy said that the phone cord from the wall to the modem has to be 6 feet or less, or else it'll be unreliable. He correctly surmised that we often have connection issues (i.e. sometimes it says "Authenticating..." for a long time), although never before recently has it totally failed to connect, and for a couple of years we never even had the long authentication issue either.

When I told him that this issue has previously been solved by a password change, he tried that again and it didn't solve the problem. I asked him why, if the cord length is the issue, we were able to have the same setup for years without a problem. He replied that the cord can deteriorate over time.

Various forums online debate whether the length of the phone cord has anything to do with internet speed or connection reliability. Does it? Could the problem be that I'm using that splitter? Does it matter where the splitter is--i.e. should the splitter only be at the wall jack, or can I have it where it is, after the first 15 foot cord? Should I do as my ISP suggests, and either (1) replace the telephone cords that go to the modem with new ones (to solve the supposed "deterioration" problem), or (2) try to rig it up with a 6 foot cord and then a really long ethernet cable (to solve the supposed "long phone cord" problem)?

Thanks for any advice you can give me. FYI, this is in Toronto, and the ISP is Primus. (I would rather switch to Teksavvy, but when I put my number into their website it says they can't provide service to me, even though I live right downtown...?)

Why can't I access my self-hosted site anymore?

KI6ILS — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 22:16:05 -0800

Switched ISPs and now not able to access my own websites which I host myself by TLD. Before I switched ISPs I was able to type in the TLD of my website to view it, eg: ki6ils.com. Now I am not able to. I have to go into the server properties and tell it to accept connections on the internal IP address and wait for the service to restart and call it by 192.168.0.2. That makes it hard when I want to update more than one site.

How can I get it working again to go to www.ki6ils.com and actually see that site, or any other site I want to work on? What changed to cause this to happen?

Oh, I updated the domain name with the new IP address.

What's the best cable company/ISP in NYC?

soonertbone — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:24:25 -0800

Moving to NYC and have my choice of cable companies. Which one should I choose to minimize stress and annoyance? My new building doesn't have an agreement with any particular cable company, so I can use whatever I want. Satellite is out, though, so I'm looking for a company that can provide me with cable (HD is important) and internet.

I've heard nothing but terrible things about TimeWarner, so I'm wondering if there's some other company out there that's good. Or, if you've had positive experiences with TW, let me know those too!

(Apologies if this has been answered before. I tried searching and only came up with options for other large cities, not NY.)

Broadband ISP in Las Vegas

Eastgate — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:53:55 -0800

What's the best broadband ISP to subscribe to in Las Vegas? I'm going to be living in Las Vegas, Nevada soon. Has anyone got any recommendations for a broadband ISP to connect my home with? I'm not sure where I'll be living, but most likely west or northwest (near Summerlin).

I use the internet heavily for web development, gaming, multimedia, etc. I need high bandwidth, for upload as well as download, and reliability. Several computers will be sharing the connection. If you could suggest what upload/download speed I can expect, that would be helpful! Price is flexible, but can easily spend $100/month.

Questions about Lubbock, TX

dolemite01 — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:19:41 -0800

Moving to Lubbock, questions about Cable/Internet providers (suddenlink vs NTS), dining, and more. I am moving to Lubbock from Austin, TX. To Attend grad school, yes I realize that Lubbock will be a shock compared to Austin, etc. I am seeking advice on a few things:

Who is the better internet/cable provider? Suddenlink or NTS, I viewed both their websites and I've found negative reviews and positive reviews for both. It really looks like Suddenlink is exactly what I have (Time Warner) and NTS is a smaller company.

Where is a good place for breakfast tacos? (non chain please)
Same for Mexican (non chain, and not Abuelo's)
BBQ?
Hamburgers? (non chain as well)

Family entertainment?

Thanks in advance!

Business ISP/Windows networking consultant recommendations in NYC area?

snickerdoodle — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:17:19 -0800

Business ISP/Windows networking consultant recommendations in NYC area? IT Sourcing help needed for a friend:

We're a 175-person non-profit with offices in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Like everyone else, we're reviewing our costs, and looking for options for a business ISP that can provide managed networking services:

1. VPN, so that all our sites can be connected
2. Network management, so we can prioritize "real" traffic and throttle shareware apps, etc.

We have fairly limited IT support options, so we're looking for an ISP that can manage the network for us. We're also looking for someone who can assist us with our windows networking (setting up domain controllers, file services, print services, etc.)

One Cisco router, two ISPs - gateway redundancy?

doomtop — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:29:28 -0800

One Cisco router, two ISPs - gateway redundancy? I'm looking for a way to use two ISP connections (one cable, one DSL) to provide gateway redundancy. What I mean is, if one gateway stops working for any reason, I would like to router to start using the other gateway automatically. Is it possible with one router, and how would it be done?

What I'd like to do is connect the equipment from the ISPs to a switch and connect the WAN of my Cisco router to the switch as well. Then I would assign the static IP address from each ISP to a separate virtual interface each on the WAN of the Cisco.

Does this make any sense? Would I need two routers to do it? Or would i need two physical interfaces?

Help me help my browser to go back to completing missing URL endings even though my ISP is jerky

Your Time Machine Sucks — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:39:57 -0800

My ISP's new "feature" of rerouting incomplete URLs to their own custom (awful) search page is hijacking my normal browser behavior of completing URLs with .com. Anything I can do to reassert normalcy? My ISP is T-Online, which like a few other ISPs has started to hijack malformed URLs and send me to an awful "did you mean...?" page, which coincidentally happens to contain advertisements.

Until this started happening a week ago, if I typed "something" into my Safari 3.2.1 (OS X 10.5.x) location field, Safari would complete the URL as "something.com" and go there, but no longer (at least, I was under the impression that this was a Safari thing and not a DNS thing, since Internet Explorer always manifested the re-route-to-a-search-page behavior).

T-Online claims that it is possible to opt out from their new "Navigationshilfe" ("Navigation Help") program, but when I followed their instructions to opt out, nothing changed. Is there a technical solution for this? My router runs dd-wrt so if there is anything I can do there or on my local machine with DNS or hosts settings, that would be ideal.

T-Online's customer support is pretty dumb, so I will consider calling them if there is no workaround, but it is improbable that they will a) know what I'm talking about, b) know if it is possible to turn it off, c) take the correct steps to turn it off, d) not somehow find a way to increase the cost of my plan in the process, so that is definitely a last resort.

Thanks for any advice!

BT Broadband Hell

nam3d — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:54:05 -0800

I'm currently with BT "Total" Broadband, who are by far the shitest ISP in Britian. We currently pay £24.46 their option 3 "unlimited" package. And it's crap, please help me pick an alternative ISP. While we do get "ulimited*" bandwidth they cap the speed so much that whilst trying to watch a 5 minute YouTube clip (not even in "HD") it stopped and started over ten times.

So what options do I have? Which ISP has the same sort of plan (between 25-50GB p/m) but doesn't make you pull your hair out because it's so bloody slow.

I would class my self as "moderate to heavy" internet user.

Any suggestions as to which alternative ISP I should use would be great.

Thanks,

William

---
For anyone interested here's what BT are currently giving me:

Down: 0.93Mb/s
Upload: 0.37Mb/s
Ping: 66ms

Email Switcheroo

drjimmy11 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:57:25 -0800

What do I need to be aware of when switching a client from ISp-provided email to Google-provided email? I am in the process of re-doing a website for a client. They also want to change hosts, so I'm building the site on the new host, and when the time comes I'll just switch the domain over.

Rather than get email through the new host, we decided to go with Google Apps Standard Edition (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html).

I'm thinking it will go like this:
1) I'll ask everyone who has an account to make sure they have downloaded all messages onto their hard drives.
2) I'll set up the account on Google and give it access to the domain. I'll re-create all the user accounts, and tell them how to set up their clients to access their new email.

My questions are:
1) Will there be any "outage" or possibility of missed messages, during the time I will be making the switch? The old ISP account will still be active, but I assume once I give Google access to the domain, no mail will arrive to clients set up to download messages from the ISP? Is there any way to forward or anything?

2) Are any of my assumptions bad, or are there any other pitfalls I should watch out for in this process?

thanks!

Croatia Online!

benzenedream — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:25:36 -0800

What is the best way to get unlimited net access in Croatia without per minute data charges? We're going to Croatia for a few weeks and will need reliable net access for VPNing back home. I'm fine with paying a bit extra for a temporary DSL/Cable install - we will be staying in a home so mobile access is not necessary. Something faster than 56k modem speed would be preferred.

help find a way to make me redundant

dozo — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:12:28 -0800

My boss is looking for the most efficient and cost-effective way to add redundancy to our 20MB fiber. After 4 years of near perfect service, our provider had a large (8 hour) downtime recently. In order to avoid this in the future we've decided to stop putting off getting a redundant line that does not share the same point of entry as the fiber. We're looking for at least a t-1 that will kick in as soon as the fiber fails (just to keep data flowing), hopefully used far less than an hour a year. After looking, we've not been able to find metered service or what seems to be a reasonable rate in our area.

What experience has anyone else had with this kind of thing? Does anyone know of anyone out there (we're in Daytona Beach) that will charge us a reasonable fee ($500 a month is the cheapest we've found so far for a single t-1!) just to be hooked up to their network and not use their service, plus whatever we do end up using? Are we even going about this in the best manner?

I keep thinking that if we had had a metered line for $200 a month for the last 4 years, they'd have made ten thousand dollars off of us for maybe ten hours and 20 GB total bandwidth. Why WOULDN'T a company want to do this?

Info source on bandwidth caps & download quotas?

kidbritish — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:40:09 -0800

Is there a website that tracks ISP's bandwidth caps and download quotas, and presents the information in an up-to-date and easy-to-read format? I'm especially interested in USA.

Help me with my internet annoyance.

zardoz — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:37:04 -0800

I sometimes have trouble with downloading via torrent: surfing becomes a slow crawl/not an option. I have a broadband DSL connection and I'll often download torrents via Transmission on my iMac.

The problem is with torrents: with either Transmission, or uTorrent I can go for several days, even longer than a week, but then suddenly surfing pages on a browser will slow to a crawl and then stop. Torrent downloading may or may not stop at that point, but eventually it stops too.

When this happens I unplug my DSL modem, plug it back in, wait a minute or two, and then I'm firing on all cylinders, torrent downloading and surfing are good for another week or so.

So how can I avoid this step? Settings in Transmission? Hack the modem?

Where in Los Angeles can pay by the hour to use a really fast (T1) internet access so I can upload 5GB of files to a coworker?

ronenosity — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:51:13 -0800

Are there any Kinkos, business centers, copy centers, cybercafes etc. in Los Angeles (downtown, silverlake, west side, ANYWHERE!) where I can pay by the hour to use a really fast (T1) internet access so I can upload 5GB of files to a coworker? I need to get 5GB of video footage to my out-of-country editor tomorrow morning..my DSL upload speed is so freakin slow.. it'll takes 20 hrs... I can fedex a DVD overnight but that would also take 12+ hours..

I need to get the files to him ASAP!

Streamless in Seattle

Blazecock Pileon — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:33:15 -0800

Does Comcast throttle hulu and other streaming video services in the Seattle area? Additionally, are there reliable, alternative high-speed Internet providers in the Seattle metropolitan area (which do not require a land-line phone connection)?

Changing domain servers: easy-peasy, or fraught with hidden danger?

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:34:47 -0800

My inamorata works for a company that is, surprise surprise, experiencing economic difficulties. One area where they are hurting is web hosting. Their site is costing them about $600 a month, which is waaay out of line for their site: html with some Flash, nothing special, not even any video. It changes rarely. What I want to do is to take over maintaining this site and save them a bunch of money. This is a small construction company with half a dozen or so networked employees. I want to set them up on LinkSky, where I do most of my client hosting.

Now, I'm a web designer, not an IT guy, and I am anxious not to screw this up. I've built a lot of sites in my time but I have never moved one before. Am I correct in my assumption that all I need to do is to FTP the extant files (and Outlook's email account info) to a new server and point the domain there? Am I missing any "gotcha's"?

One caveat is that they are currently getting email through the Microsoft Exchange, which they don't like because that too is costing money. So I want to re-configure Outlook (a new email account, obviously) for the new servers. Shouldn't be difficult, right?

However, I've looked at some earlier posts, such as the one below, and they do make me a bit uneasy. So: is this a dumb thing for me to attempt?

http://ask.metafilter.com/4626/Moving-Domain-Hosts

Is Big Brother Surfing With Me?

watercarrier — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:56:56 -0800

Very strange DSL behavior - Is it Big Brother? I've been dealing with this daily now and after extensive research - I've pretty much concluded that something or someone is surfing with me. But maybe I'm wrong and it's something else.

For about 2 weeks I've been experiencing very weird ISP behavior. Dial up problems, weird error messages, disconnects and just plain slow surfing. My machine is a clean machine - no viruses, adware - trojans or cookies. No cache older than a few hours either.

All surfing, streaming, downloading were effected during these lags. I've run Hijack This and nothing seems out of the ordinary except 2 exceptions - which are

AF891CD7E25B}: NameServer = XXXXXX
O17 - HKLM\System\CS1\Services\Tcpip\..\{470F728C-8ABE-4657-B74C-AF891CD7E25B}: NameServer = XXXXXX

(I've x'd out the addy)

The only remedy that seems to work in this situation is CMD
netsh winsock reset catalog - and restarting. Then it works perfectly.

I'm running XP Pro on a pretty new machine. No network. I've run diagnostics and there don't seem to be any problems with the network card or the modem. The cable is fine as well. I've run msconfig and taken out anything that could be a problem or culprit. I've set up new dialers. Currently I have only 2 things that I can see running at start up - one is the AV and the other is a desktop clock - both when disabled did nothing to present the above mentioned problems.

I tried firewalling and disabling firewall - same results in both instances.

I've tried accessing the web via a different machine and had same exact issue. It's not the puter - it's the line. ISP will not admit to any fault or problem only mentioning that there have been some *problems on their end and the issues should be cleared up now*.

Should be mentioned - trying to surf via proxy gets me disconnected.

Could this be some kind of filter placed on my line by the ISP that only the complete reset rids me of (albeit temporarily)? I am currently out of the country living in a war zone where there have been cases of close monitoring. So this isn't completely out of left field.

Is there anyway to find out what/who is messing up my internet connection via tracking software and is there anyway I can track someone who is tracking me?

Eu tu, AT&T?

SpacemanStix — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:22:56 -0800

There is talk about how ISP's are going to be cooperating with the RIAA to curtail piracy (warning letters, shutting off service, etc.), in lieu of the RIAA taking people to court. If ISP's refused to be involved without a court order previously, why are they getting so involved now? It's a crazy amount of extra work, it gets into the privacy of its users, and it creates the potential for false positives and a LOT of negative press that used to go to the RIAA. I can't figure out the upside.

Are they getting a money cut somewhere? Are they being strong-armed into it? Or do they see it as a lesser evil to agree to these terms than to be forced to hand over customer information on a regular basis, due to court orders?

WiMax: yea or nay?

cyrusdogstar — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:04:30 -0800

Looking into potentially getting WiMax, specifically from a company called TowerStream, at my place of work. Has anyone here used a commercial WiMax provider (TowerStream or otherwise)? Our primary goal is getting better upstream (we currently have 768Kb); all asymetric solutions cap out around 2Mb, and symmetric solutions are typically very expensive. We can get a WiMax symmetric connection of 8Mb for almost half the $/Mb of an equivalent bonded T1 or partial T3, which is why it's pretty darn appealing.

Trying to find anecdotes and/or potential pitfalls with migrating to WiMax providers, as I don't see any obvious drawbacks just by thinking about it (weather: apparently not a problem; connectivity: multiple potential antennas are available in our area so we get decent redundancy; otherwise comparable to T1/T3 in terms of SLAs, etc).

Cheap ISP/Phone in Montreal

PowerCat — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:36:18 -0800

So it's time to shop around for a new ISP. I'm looking for DSL or Cable, over 5 mbps and no download limit. They should offer a normal phone line and hopefully unlimited long distance calls to Quebec, at least. I'm currently on Cable with videotron but it's very expensive.
I know there are some lesser known companies out there that have something good and cheap to offer, help me out!
Thanks.

Cheaper alternative to Comcast DSL?

chihiro — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:13:35 -0800

I'm thinking of signing up with a new ISP that doesn't cost as much as Comcast, but the choices are overwhelming. Help! We've been with Comcast DSL for nearly 5 years, and I've never had any complaint about the service. But it costs us $63/month, and since I'm at home full time with my daughter I'm looking to cut costs wherever possible. I'm really not sure which ISP would be best, though. I've been looking at www.thelist.com, but I don't even know where to begin with all the choices.

*We are just outside Philadelphia.
*We do not have, or want, cable television or a telephone land line.
*We have an iMac G5 desktop (4 years old) and a Macbook (2 years old), so wireless could be a good option if the price is right.
*I would like to continue to have a fast connection.

Thank you!

Leggo my torrento

Brodiggitty — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:02:52 -0800

Why have my torrent downloads suddenly stopped? Is it my ISP? If yes, are they allowed to do that? So I was about 70 percent into a large torrent download when my download cut out. I recently switched to utorrent 1.8.1. I used to use BitTornado all the time on the same computer/isp so I tried downloading some torrents using bittornado again. No dice. uTorrent shows lots of available peers (200+). It connects to none.

This doesn't seem like a throttling, but a complete pulling of the torrent plug. Yes, I read this question. I don't see how it could be my router because I had no problems until the other day, when it just stopped cold. Internet is working fine otherwise.

I have an "unlimited" plan from a local, smallfry isp in a small, isolated Canadian community. Can they legally block my service in this way if that is what is happening? I can't see it being anything else.

And yes, I see the irony in asking if I have legal recourse when, in all probability, I'm illegally downloading files.

Erratic network behavior

Gyan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:39:51 -0800

My net connection has dropped like clockwork around midnight over the past few days. What's up? For the past 4 or 5 days, around midnight, give or take 10 minutes, I lose my net connection and don't get it back till morning. It doesn't happen during the day.

At first, I thought it was my router Netgear WGR614 v7 since it has been flaky before. But I bridged my LAN/WAN cables together (my ISP has a switch in the building and I get a CAT-5 direct from there) and the issue persists.

So, I try to ping the gateway but can't, and Wireshark shows other customers trying to get the gateway's MAC via ARP. BTW, I am assigned a static private IP i.e. behind a NAT, due to "scarce IPs".

So, today morning, with my connection on, I note down my gateway's MAC. An hour ago, my connection dropped momentarily. When I checked my gateway MAC, it was different than in the morning. When I flushed ARP and checked again soon after, it was different again and was a 3rd set of numbers, this time I could resolve names but not connect anywhere; this one also happened to be listed twice i.e. for another IP as well. I noted all numbers, and tried each as a static entry. The first one (morning) worked but was erratic (dropouts), the middle one seems to work normally (so far), and the final one doesn't.

What seems to be going on? Local or remote?

My OS is XP SP2. This is in India.

I need cable/internet. Should I go with Comcast, DirectTV, or DISH Network?

decrescendo — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:03:14 -0800

I need cable/internet. Should I go with Comcast, DirectTV, or DISH Network? I just moved into a new apartment in Arlington, VA and I need cable. I have a 50" Panasonic plasma and I want as much HD as possible. I'm pretty sure we'll have line-of-sight to the satellites, as well.

I despise Comcast because of its internet throttling/bandwidth and it's horrible customer service (I should have cable already but they screwed me over).

Do I go with satellite? If so, do I get DISH or DirectTV? Have you all had problems with rain fade, reception in storms, etc.?

And if I get them, should I go with Comcast shitty internet or Verizon? Or do they have satellite internet?