Maybe the question first.
Our house is connected through wifi (something more advanced I assume, because it has wired-like latency), there is a router (Linksys WRT320N), and after that there is a switch (TRENDnet TEG-S80g) where everything is connected together.
I can say the connection is perfectly stable without any latency spikes 99,9% of the time, but occasionally it looks like something completely dies over at the ISP, or something is being worked on for a short time. Like, once in a few months. Last year it was a bit worse, but nothing that could qualify as too much.
At least for the past two months I didn't notice one bit of a problem.
This morning, internet was weirdly slow, and after a short while, it looked like there was no connection anywhere at all. Then it looked like such enormous packetloss it was pretty much dead anyway. For brief moments it seemed normal, but quickly returned to useless state. I tried to ping and trace various servers, eventually realizing it was dead from the beginning. This happened several times in past and was always a confirmed problem with some of the ISP's network, either a short temporary problem with some hardware, connection somewhere at their own ISP, or some hardware upgrade/failure.
I called my ISP and this imbecile started to tell me all sorts of crap.
I learned that:
- he could ping my antenna just fine, but he couldn't get any response from my router, thus it was a router problem (no sh** sherlock, I have ICMP packets disabled)
- the fact I didn't have a single problem in at least two months of pretty much nonstop usage was completely irrelevant
- the fact that I can't even ping the gateway clearly shows my router is bad
- having the house network working fine doesn't mean the WAN port on the router isn't bad
- that I shouldn't talk to him like to an idiot
He kept going on and on, until I just hung up on him out of pure frustration and anger.
I don't know much about networking so I couldn't argue with him (and it would have been be pointless anyway), but please honestly tell me which one was the idiot here.
I've had this router for like five years, and at some point I had it connected to fast fibre connection and was seeding/downloading torrents almost nonstop at 3MB/s for two years, and not once did it act weird, unless there was some problem at my former ISP. I also never needed to reset it once (unless I changed some settings).
Having said all that, how could it be even remotely possible anything about the router was bad? Of course everything was back to normal within an hour after the problems started.
I am open to new ideas though, and since the router is pretty old, and I was curious about trying Openwrt anyway, I wouldn't mind buying new one. That's the second part of this thread: depending on the answers to the initial question, I might need some tips for a new router.
At least I could prove it's not problem over here next time the connection goes kaput.
Our house is connected through wifi (something more advanced I assume, because it has wired-like latency), there is a router (Linksys WRT320N), and after that there is a switch (TRENDnet TEG-S80g) where everything is connected together.
I can say the connection is perfectly stable without any latency spikes 99,9% of the time, but occasionally it looks like something completely dies over at the ISP, or something is being worked on for a short time. Like, once in a few months. Last year it was a bit worse, but nothing that could qualify as too much.
At least for the past two months I didn't notice one bit of a problem.
This morning, internet was weirdly slow, and after a short while, it looked like there was no connection anywhere at all. Then it looked like such enormous packetloss it was pretty much dead anyway. For brief moments it seemed normal, but quickly returned to useless state. I tried to ping and trace various servers, eventually realizing it was dead from the beginning. This happened several times in past and was always a confirmed problem with some of the ISP's network, either a short temporary problem with some hardware, connection somewhere at their own ISP, or some hardware upgrade/failure.
I called my ISP and this imbecile started to tell me all sorts of crap.
I learned that:
- he could ping my antenna just fine, but he couldn't get any response from my router, thus it was a router problem (no sh** sherlock, I have ICMP packets disabled)
- the fact I didn't have a single problem in at least two months of pretty much nonstop usage was completely irrelevant
- the fact that I can't even ping the gateway clearly shows my router is bad
- having the house network working fine doesn't mean the WAN port on the router isn't bad
- that I shouldn't talk to him like to an idiot
He kept going on and on, until I just hung up on him out of pure frustration and anger.
I don't know much about networking so I couldn't argue with him (and it would have been be pointless anyway), but please honestly tell me which one was the idiot here.
I've had this router for like five years, and at some point I had it connected to fast fibre connection and was seeding/downloading torrents almost nonstop at 3MB/s for two years, and not once did it act weird, unless there was some problem at my former ISP. I also never needed to reset it once (unless I changed some settings).
Having said all that, how could it be even remotely possible anything about the router was bad? Of course everything was back to normal within an hour after the problems started.
I am open to new ideas though, and since the router is pretty old, and I was curious about trying Openwrt anyway, I wouldn't mind buying new one. That's the second part of this thread: depending on the answers to the initial question, I might need some tips for a new router.
At least I could prove it's not problem over here next time the connection goes kaput.