I know just enough about this topic to be able to use words like “routing”, “packets”, and “pipe” in all the wrong places, and appear even more stupid than if I knew nothing about it, so please bear with me if I frame this awkwardly…
I have wireless broadband. It ain’t perfect, and often the signal drops out. But a lot of times, the problem isn’t between my machine and the ISP across town, but between the ISP and the internet at large. I suspect they’ve gone for some sort of cheapo deal with the telcos or something. I don’t know. So I have two questions:
1. When this happens and my wireless “modem” says it’s connected, but I can’t access sites, I will try various sites (usually based in the US or Australia) and will be unsuccessful. I get “looking up site name” in the status bar, and then a timeout. My question is, why am I able to often “kickstart” connectivity by visiting a New Zealand or UK site? And more to the point, why, after I do this once, can I more often than not access the entire internet?
2. The other thing that I don’t understand is that the scenario in the last question (problems between the ISP and the outside world) is often precipitated by my personal connection to the ISP going down. Once I am able to re-establish connection, I get the problem I described above, but that’s on the other side of the ISP. Why would that be? Also, in this second scenario, the browser (I use Firefox) doesn’t even make an attempt to access the site, and I get “site cannot be found” the nanosecond I click the link - until, that is, I visit the New Zealand Herald or the BBC.
Just a WAG, but it almost sounds like screwy DNS. (DNS is somewhat like a phone book - it’s the mechanism that translates something like “www.straightdope.com” into the numeric IP address of the server the website is hosted on.)
Check with your ISP to find out what the preferred DNS server is, and enter it wherever appropriate - might be in your PC, or might be in your broadband router.
I have a DSL connection through a router (not wireless) and I experienced the same symptoms you describe. I called my ISP’s tech support and they had me reset my router (pressing the button on the back for 10 seconds - not just ‘power cycling’ it). Of course, after you do this, you have to reenter the proper stuff. After I did this, those symptoms were greatly diminished.
If you have all the info, you can do it yourself, but if you call your ISP, they will likely be able to walk you through it.
BTW, It also appeared that some of the problems were related to the Windows firewall (sometimes I could ‘kickstart’ the connection by turning the firewall off, then back on), so before I called the ISP, I installed Zone Alarm.
Sounds like copies of the Herald and BBC pages are held in a cache by your ISP because so many of their users are requesting them. Retrieving copies from a cache rather than from the original websites might well bypass other network problems.
It does appear to be that way, but I don’t think it is. If I click on the Beeb or the NZH, I get a lot of data transfer happening in the little ZoneAlarm box, then the site opens up to that day’s current headlines even if I haven’t visited for a day or two, and I can click through to other new news items on the respective sites, and then I find the entire internet is functioning normally.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I’ll have a chat to the ISP and let you know what they say.