Whew. After a boatload of troubleshooting, I think I’ve finally narrowed in on the cause of our internet woes. In short, our AT&T FastAccess DSL was periodically losing connectivit and failing to load pages. But then it would start working again.
The symptoms were various, including DNS errors, page not found errors, and/or “connection was interrupted” errors. The common thread is that it would interrupt our surfing, streaming, or whatever experience. Annoying.
At first (way, way back) I chalked it up to DNS issues and switched our old D-Link router to “Advanced DNS Service.” This improved things, but the problem eventually started getting worse.
I tried resetting both the DSL modem and our wireless router, updating our router’s firmware, changing to OpenDNS for DNS service, etc.
I won’t bore you with the details, but I was eventually able to narrow down the problems to:
- a failing (or at least struggling) wireless router,
- a router/modem conflict, and
- a failing DSL modem causing intermittent losses of DSL sync
Amazingly, all three things seemed to have an effect.
To solve this, I bought a new router along with a new DSL modem and then set it up with the modem in “bridge” mode and the router in PPPoE mode. Previously, they were both trying to route our traffic.
I haven’t written all of the details up yet, but I will likely share the most relevant tidbits in one or more futures posts.
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