My ongoing internet connection saga


My internet has been driving me crazy for the last few months.  I feel like my ISP is sick of me calling, I am tired of my hubby demanding we change yet doing nothing about it, and yet I am watching money funnel out for a net that is totally substandard.
Though this topic is not WoW related, I cannot play WoW (or blog for that matter) without internet, and so into my WoW blog this internet saga goes.

It started with random disconnections of the service.  This would last for an hour and then go back to normal.  It would happen once a day at first, and then, not every day, and it was around the time that my alarm company folded under and was taken over by a different alarm company (I have a monitored back to base alarm).  I thought perhaps the alarm company was doing some testing or communicating back which was blocking the ADSL.  The phones still worked.  However, when it started happening on a daily occurence I rang Internode and asked them for some advice about what was going on.  By this stage we had also changed the modem twice and the router wondering if there was something wrong with those.  And we also replaced the actual phone lines connecting the modem to the wall socket.

So Internode told me that I had too many phone lines in the house (we have one for our fax, one in our bedroom, one in the kitchen and 2 in the study (which is actually split from the bedroom) and that multiple filters cause problems with your ADSL.  So we did a diagnostic where we removed every single phone and filter from the wall but we couldn't do anything about the alarm.  And they asked us to leave it overnight and see how it went.  They also thought we had a central splitter for our alarm which was causing issues and that we should consider getting the filter on that replaced.

As things do, after we did that, our ADSL connection was perfect.

So for one week we had no land line and no faxes.  Didn't really miss it, but we had to warn people who were trying to call us.

After a week we started having problems again.  We had connected the phones back by this stage and so when I wanted to use the internet (ie raid) I would disconnect the phones to see if that worked.  Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't.

Then about a month ago, our fax machine stopped receiving faxes.  We could fax out, but we couldn't receive any faxes.  Hubby was convinced that it was the fax machine and wanted to buy a new one, but I said it might be related to whatever problem was plaguing us with our ADSL.  So we just left it.

With continuing loss of internet, I called Internode again who suggested we get our alarm people to service the central splitter.  I organised them to come out at a cost of $185 for which they told us there was nothing wrong with the line and we don't have a central splitter, there is a filter on the alarm side of the line, behind the panel.  OK, well, that was that.  Interestingly, after the guy came out, the internet worked fine again and went swimmingly for almost 2 weeks.  Perhaps he fixed a loose connection or something.

But in the last week it's been terrible again.  Now the one hour of constant dcs have become almost a 20 hour phenomenon.  So I logged another call to Internode, who said that we should get a professional to come look at our lines and install a central splitter.  I have been almost unable to raid all this week because of my crappy net and constant dcs, and been playing off 3G which is totally suboptimal.  So on Friday night I sent an email to a company who wrote back on Saturday saying that they can help me with my problem and they guarantee my ADSL will work correctly, and would Monday be ok to come out?  So I was very happy, I thought my problems would be fixed come Monday!

However, TODAY we have had another development, in that our phone lines all went dead and the internet has been intermittentnet all day and all last night.  So back I got on the phone to Internode saying that my lines were dead and they asked me if I had been having problems with my internet... when HAVEN'T I been having problems with my internet, I felt like saying!... and they said they will send a technician to check it out on Monday.  I said that I had organised for someone to come on Monday to look at the lines inside the house, and should I cancel it since he wouldn't be able to test or fix anything with a totally dead service.  And they said yes I should cancel that.  Bummer.

Then the internet started working, just before I left home today to visit my mother-in-law who is leaving tomorrow.  It stayed working for at least 10 minutes.  I checked the phones and they were all still dead... WTF is going on???

So, lucky Rag is dead because I can't really raid tonight, except on 3G.  However, I was really looking forward to getting my legendary in Ulduar, so I hope that I can do that on my crappy connection.  I think the Shade of Aran sums it up nicely for me:

"I want this nightmare to be over!"
And I want fibre to my home.  NBN can't come quick enough.  Though I would still probably have filter and alarm issues, but at least I would have good new net... maybe.

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