Ever since we moved into this house, we’ve had a problem off and on in which the internet connection will die out for a minute or so every few minutes. (You can imagine how annoying this was when I was playing online poker.)
For a long time it stopped, but a few weeks ago it started again. I realized that it started about the time we started using the heater, and what’s more, the outages correspond more or less with the cycles of the furnace coming on and off. It doesn’t appear to happen with the air conditioner, even though it’s the same unit.
In fact, I’ve just shut off the heat for a bit, and I’ve had no outage, so it almost has to be the problem.
The house is old with old wiring and phone lines (though this doesn’t seem to affect the phone–just the DSL). What would cause this, and more importantly, is there anything I can do about it?
What type of heater?
There are oil burners that emit lots of RFI, and that might cause a poorly-sheilded modem to drop the connection.
You could try putting a noise filter on the power supply, and I would also check to make sure that your heater isn’t connected to the phone line - some oil burners would call when they got low.
Assuming you have a forced-air system (you really didn’t give us much useful info!), there will be a fairly large fan motor to distribute the air. Often those put out a fair amount of electrical noise when starting up. Does the outage happen when the burner comes on, or a minute or two later when the fan motor starts up?
Also, where does the phone line that your computer uses run? Anywhere near the furnace & fan motors? Is this DSL connection run over those “old phone wires”, or did you run a new line for it? (If not, you should consider this. Running one line from the computer location back to the phone entry point of the house isn’t usually that hard. And often there is a whole lot of DSL speed lost in that last 30 feet (10m) or so of wiring!)