Categories
Geek

Net down

The innanet connection was down this morning. It put something of a dampner on the morning’s blog/check news/check email/check blog comments activity I’ve become used to.

Having had either cable or ADSL for some years now, it’s always a rude shock when this happens, a bit like getting no signal on the television. And it’s a reminder of just how much use of computers involves online activity these days. If the Net’s down, what am I going to do? Stuck with writing documents which nobody but me can then read, or playing games.

It turned out to be an ISP problem that took quite a few hours to resolve, and as it happened it affected their own web site, making it difficult to find out what was going on. They’ve had a few problems recently. I wonder if it’s time to start shopping around?

Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t choose today to work from home.

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

7 replies on “Net down”

If you rely on something that much, you need a backup.

Be it dialup, iBurst, 3G, EV-DO, NextG, cable, or a second line with a second ADSL service on a second ISP.

Nothing is up 100% of the time. No service is -that- good. If you want better uptime, a change of ISP probably won’t do nearly as much good as two different el-cheapo ISPs will. Or one normal price ISP and one el-cheapo ISP.

Personally my iiNet ADSL2+ line has gone down for some pretty whopping big outages in the recent past. The flatmate’s iBurst card was a great alternative, as are the iiNet backup dialup service and the free dialup account provided by work.

Pah, of course I don’t rely on it that much. I’m just having a whinge :-)

But I am considering switching to an ISP that doesn’t have such reliance on an upstream provider. And I wanted to look around at an upgrade to ADSL2+ or cable speeds anyway.

Not that any of it matters until my current contract runs out sometime next year.

Are you with Netspace? I noticed it was crap yesterday too, mind you I only have dial-up and only got a max of 14.something kbps. And I DID decide to work from home yesterday. Grrr…

After months of reliability, Telstra fell down for several hours on Wednesday. I wasn’t home, so it did not matter much, but I get panicky if the net fails to proceed.

Silliest oxymoron in history is someone asking you to check their web site to get help if your internet is down!

Comments are closed.