In the last few months i have been having issues with my internet connection at home and finally last night i think i have fixed the problem.
The Issue: For a while now my internet connection has been very unstable with the connection dropping out every 5 minutes to 5 hours. This has pretty much made my life very hard due to the constant remarks from my wife "have you fixed the internet yet" or " the internet is broken again". Anyhow after trying the a few different ADSL modems and settings i had finally decided that it was time to spend some serious time (and money) to get it working no matter what.
What to do?
About 4 months ago i bought a new Billion ADSL modem . This seemed to work good for a while but then i upgraded the firmware on the device and things seemed to start going much worse. So i went back to the old NetGear modem i have had for about 2 years. Then when the NetGear modem started to fail i bought a new version of the NetGear modem thinking that maybe new hardware will equal better connection. I was wrong. Tried my other Netcomm NB5 modem which again seemed to make some difference but quickly reverted back to the old ways of dropping out every few minutes. So then i resorted to doing something that I almost never do. Call tech support at TPG. Their default response was to do a plugs out isolation test. So i jumped through their hoops and did a plugs out test. I disconnected all the phones from the phone lines and again this seemed to make things a little better but it still quickly went back to the normally drop outs every few minutes. Then yesterday after many attempts i finally got hold of TPG tech support again. This time they told me they did an line test last weekend and my phone line was at 1.8ohms in stead of a normal 10ohms. This is where i twigged that while i had disconnected all the phones from the wall i still left in the ADLS line filters.
Now i was sure that this must have been the problem, one of my line filters must have been faulty. So when I got home last night i quickly raced around and unplugged all the line filters and TADA… the internet connection started to work again. This was amazing, never before has my ADSL modem re-connected automatically after i lost a connection. This must have been the problem. I started to run around the house screaming "i fixed it!, I fixed it!" but my celebration was to soon.
Not long after removing the offending line filter which just happened to be the oldest one I had i quickly realised something was still wrong. My connection was still dropping lost of packets when running a ping test and the connection was still dropping, but at least it was still re-connecting.
So desperate for help i again called TPG tech support. After being hung up on about 3 times i finally got hold of someone to talk to. This time they did another line test and confirmed things were still looking good. Then surprisingly they said they would change the back end to make the connection "more stable" amazingly within 5 minutes my ADSL connection dropped and re-connected only to see my signal strength was now double what it had been. This was fantastic. I was now pinging away with virtual no drop outs.
So now i have an internet connection that has been working for 12 hours without any problems. I am a much happier camper and am hoping that my wife will also be a lot happier now.
The moral of the story is if you are having problem with anything IT then don’t be afraid to called your Tech Support. While i am some what of any IT expert i certainly cant fix all IT problem myself and that i should never be afraid to ask for help.
Thanks TPG. Shame on me for thinking that your IT support line would not be able to help me.
