Thu 7 December 2006 - 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.
December 7th, 2006 at 6:08pm
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.
December 7th, 2006 at 6:13pm
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.
December 8th, 2006 at 10:59am
Nothing wrong with playing games… Madden NFL is always a handy back up
December 8th, 2006 at 12:35pm
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…
December 8th, 2006 at 9:19pm
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.
December 9th, 2006 at 9:03am
Yes Liz, Netspace. With their status page down, I discovered they re-post outage news on Whirlpool. Not much use if you’re at home with no access, of course.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:51pm
Silliest oxymoron in history is someone asking you to check their web site to get help if your internet is down!