Flakey Internet Woes

I love the high speed of Frontier FiOS where I can get upload and download speeds of 20+ Mbps that make me more efficient at work:

www.speedtest.net

 

I’ve been using FiOS reliably ever since it was installed back in October 2011. A few days ago I noticed flakey internet operation where I would click a web link in my browser or click a bookmark link and the page could not be reached. It would only fail with about 1 in 30 or 40 attempts.

Tech Support Call #1

After waiting a few minutes I spoke with a woman at Frontier and she asked what my symptoms were and recommended that I reset my browser. I told her that this problem of not connecting to web pages was independent of browser and OS (since I have: Mac OS X – Mountain Lion, Windows 7, Windows XP, Chrome, Windows 8 pre-release).

We tried to power cycle the router, same issue.

We tried to reset the router, then setup all the wifi and security again (major pain to setup all my wifi devices in the house), same issue.

Tech Support Call #2

The first two phone calls I was put on hold, then mysteriously disconnected before reaching support. Finally a real person talked with me and told me that he had to transfer me to FiOS support.

I couldn’t hear the FiOS tech support guy clearly, so he phoned me back. Today we power-cycled the big FiOS box in the garage and reconnected the coax cable between the wall and the router, then changed the DNS server settings from Auto to fixed IP numbers.

Summary

In the past two days I’ve spent over 90 minutes trying to get my Internet connection to work reliably. Time is money and I’m not happy when my Internet connection becomes flakey. Hopefully, with all of the fiddling today I can now concentrate on my work instead of my Internet connection.

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