When I had a wired connection with AT&T, it might happen once every other month or so. Now that I have a T-Mobile wireless Gateway, it happens just about every day, sometimes twice in a day. I talked to a friend yesterday who has the whole Spectrum package, cable and internet, and he said he gets kicked off at least once a day, too. At least I can restart my Gateway; he has to wait until it comes back on by itself. What’s your experience?
Never.
Verizon FiOS seems to stoppa-to-work about every 3 months - we power cycle the router and it’s usually fine. Except for that time I managed to cut the fiber drop with the pole-pruner. They came and fixed it on Thanksgiving day at no charge.
What do you mean kicked off? Lose connection requiring a modem or router reboot? Once every 3 months, maybe.
It varies. I have Comcast/Xfinity; there have been periods where our internet connection has been glitchy, and we might lose connection (for anywhere from a few moments to a few minutes) several times a day. That hasn’t happened for months, now (and now I’m jinxing myself, and it’ll start happening again).
I sometimes stay up late, gaming or watching videos; there are also times where they are apparently doing a scheduled maintenance in the dead of the night, and it happens that they are kicking us few night owls offline.
I have T-Mobile and rarely lose connection. Usually, right after a power outage.
I have AT&T. Recently we lost service in my area for six days but that wasn’t due to being “kicked off”, it was due to extreme weather causing damage as well as hindering repair crews from getting to and repairing said damage.
Aside from that… I can’t recall the last time. Certainly much more than 5-6 years? Maybe once or twice I’ve had to reboot a modem in the 25+ years I’ve been on the internet.
How often your service is interrupted could depend on a lot of things besides just your ISP, I’d think. Unreliable power supply for example - that can cause problems with modems and computers that is unrelated to the internet service provider.
I haven’t had to intervene in our internet service in the 8 years we’ve had Verizon FiOS.
Comcast would kick us off every couple of weeks and cycling the routers would not resolve the issue about once every other month necessitating a painful call with idiots.
#1 reason we left Comcast.
Hardly ever. I have AT&T Fiber. The only times I’ve lost service in the last 4-5 years has been due to a tech accidentally breaking something in the box when doing an install for someone else. Every once in a while in our old apartment it went down, but since we’ve moved to a townhome, it’s been pretty solid (*knocks on wood).
Not my experience with Comcast. Any kind of interaction with them is horrific, but no issues with their product. ISP service is excellent, rarely goes down, if it does it always comes back of its own accord.
Never in the past three years. We moved to Comcast/Xfinity three years ago. Our prior provider was prone to problems. We switched over and haven’t had a problem yet, plus our speeds quadrupled.
I guess I’m wondering what “kicked off” means. This sounds like it might be an issue with your router, rather than their service actually going down. If service goes down, you usually don’t have to do anything - it comes back when it comes back, and restarting your router won’t help. You might occasionally have to reboot a router, but rarely.
Since I started using Start.ca DSL, never. I have never once had it fail.
When I used cable internet it was a routine occurrence.
As a night owl, I used to notice outages of about 30 to 60 minutes in the small hours of the morning every few weeks or so, apparently due to whatever maintenance/upgrades they were doing. About a year ago this cable provider had a major nation-wide outage, and because of the stupid way their cell phone service was routed through the same infrastructure as their internet service, everyone who subscribed to their cell service (not me, fortunately) lost that service as well as internet. It was down for nearly two days.
The result was that this cable operator came under severe pressure and scrutiny from regulatory agencies and the media. Multiple emails of apology were sent out by the prez, with promises to do better. And here’s the funny thing. Ever since then there’s been nary an outage. Apparently all the “essential maintenance” they were doing was either no longer essential, or, more likely, the bastards had got off their asses and found a way to do it without disrupting service. And I’m sure that they’re now introducing redundancies that they were too cheap to build before.
Same here. I share the WiFi subscription with my opstairsikers, who keep the router in their apartment and have some auto-reboot management software that fixes the problem. So on the rare occasions the internet does go down, it’s usually back up again pretty promptly.
We’ve had both Verizon FiOS and CableVision umm Optimum umm Altice. In both cases, internet is occasionally interrupted for anywhere between a couple hours to a couple days approximately once every 3-4 months. They don’t give us explanations but we tend to think it’s regional most of the time – construction or other-caused area outages.
The rest of the time, solid as a rock.
If there’s a better way to say it, tell me.
Yes, this. You’re rolling along, singing a song, and suddenly you’re not connected to the internet.
The T-Mobile Gateway is wireless unlike my old AT&T router which was connected to a wire that ran from a pole in the alley into my living room. When I lose the internet connection I turn off the Gateway using the on/off button on the back, wait about 10 seconds, and turn it back on. Then after about a minute, I’m connected to the internet again.
See above.
I have never thought it was their service going down. Because the T-Mobile Gateway is wireless, you have to search for the best place physically to put it in your home. When I lose internet connectivity (that’s what I mean by “kicked off”), I assume it’s something to do with the inherent unreliability of any wireless connection. (Like when cell phone calls get dropped.)
When my friend told me that he loses connectivity routinely with Spectrum, it made me wonder how others fare with different ISPs.
If anyone is interested.
@ParallelLines Is the Gateway correctly called a router? I’m guessing it is. I couldn’t have this conversation without inviting you to join it. 
I also had very poor connectivity with my Canadian cable internet provider. And I have had no problems since switching to fiber via the phone company.
I would say disconnection. Kicked off implies someone is actually doing this to you on purpose. Disconnections can happen for any number of reasons (lost service from the ISP, bad modem, bad router etc.).
I just lost my internet connection for the fourth time today. 