Our IP was dead three mornings ago. Router says "DSL", but no internet. Wife has spent several hours on phone with them, twice told service will be restored soon. This morning's call produced a recording allowing only useless options, no way to talk to a human being. To boot, this morning the land-line went dead also. Wrested her Chromebook away long enough to inform my friends........ Frank
Ive had similar problems with AT&T. They made me so angry that I don’t even want to post about it....grrrrr
Glad to hear from you, @Frank Sanoica , and sorry to hear that you are having connection issues. I know there was a massive outage with Century Link a few days ago, but thought they had everything working again. I have also been reading that people are reporting that the ATM machines are not working (probably not related to the internet outage, but you never know), and that they were not able to get money out of their accounts. Since you had talked about the nephews coming out to visit, I had assumed that you were just busy with family. Wishing you good luck getting the internet up and going again. Also......consider getting a smart phone, so this does not happen again ! We miss you when you are gone.
I read that Century Link was hacked. Any truth to that? If you have a cell or tablet with cell capabilities, you can go with that, @Frank Sanoica .
That is exactly what I read about Century Link, as well, @Don Alaska ; but I didn’t want to get in trouble for posting something that might be considered a conspiracy-area topic, out here in the main forum. From what Frank has said before, they only have a basic cell phone, and nothing that would work as a hot spot connection, which is why I was suggesting that they get at least one smart phone, just in case.
@Don Alaska @Yvonne Smith We have Frontier Communications. They are the only available landline provider here. We each have a Tracfone, supposedly internet capable, never have been able to do so with mine, recently, my wife's quit working, though it's a later model, she was doing internet, but now is informed it's (SD?) is at capacity. We use DSL via the landline using a router Frontier provided, via wifi). Pretty fast, no complaint ever, in 6 years, till now, first outage. Frontier seems at a loss...........the monthly cost burden for the landline, DSL, and satellite TV is pushing us to the limit now. More load, we cannot tolerate, if we want to continue to eat! Today we walked the Riverwalk, got back mid-afternoon, lo and behold the green light glowed "internet". She immediately began using her Chromebook. Towards evening, I fired up my trusty laptop, it would not access the router. One of the techs she spoke with had changed the network connection ID, and it wanted a password, no idea what would work, or how to squeeze it's digits out of the laptop's settings. So, another 2 hours on the phone, during which the first tech had her momentarily unplug the router from landline and power, unwittingly disconnecting her Chromebook from the net, and he was lost. After 94 queues on the Frontier wait for live chat. The second person got it straightened out, after another hour and a half, holding the phone and working the Chromebook. Now, why did the Chrome NOT require a password? Both it and the laptop work simultaneously through the router. The tech did not know! Does anyone here? I'm glad to be back, ready to cuss and dis-cuss, maybe emphasis on the former until I simmer down! Frank
I don’t have any good answers for you, Frank; but hopefully some of the people here that understand this better might have a knowledge of what is going on. I remember, back when we had a computer, I had to always know what the password was, and sometimes they put it on the bottom of the modem/router and I had to copy it down and then put it in the computer. Now that I have a tablet, it saves all of my passwords, and connects automatically to any place I have connected before. Maybe, because your wife’s Chromebook is newer, it connects like my iPad does.
I don't remember who I'm using for an ISP, as we switch every few years, but I think we're on Comcast right now. It seems that whenever we switch to a new provider, our service will be great for several months, okay for a couple of years, and then it will deteriorate. It might even be a matter of the hardware that they don't want to replace after they've put it in, I don't know. Regardless of which ISP I have though, there are times when my connection is bad. When that happens, I'll just use the hotspot on my phone as a connection for an hour or so.
@Ken Anderson My wife has mentioned a "hotspot" of some sort that one buys, and it allows receiving TV reception without cable or satellite, which we have now. We need to trim down the monthly cost for all this nonsense and are looking at getting rid of Dish. You mention hotspot "on your phone"; the thing she describes is a box about 6X6X6 inches. What's up with that? Frank
For a couple of years, we used our Verizon hotspot as our only Internet connection and it worked fine, powering a couple of televisions streaming content, and both of our computers. We had an unlimited data plan that was truly unlimited, and which they no longer offered. However, they kept raising the price until it was cheaper to get an ISP. On our current plan, we theoretically have unlimited data, in that we aren't charged for overages, but they throttle the hotspot connection after an hour or two. I don't know about other smartphone plans or devices but I have US Cellular and an iPhone, and it has a hotspot option, which creates an Internet network connection that you can connect to through your computer or television. It's just as fast as our regular ISP so if I'm having trouble with my ISP, I'll connect to my phone hotspot for an hour, then go back to the ISP for a few minutes; if it's working okay by then, I'll stay there; otherwise I'll go back to the hotspot. So far, at least, I can get around the throttling if I shut off the hotspot for a few minutes.
I think that ISPs tend to oversell in whichever areas they serve. This is why you might get a very good connection from a new ISP, only to have to have it deteriorate over a period of years. Once enough people have left because of poor connections, the service gets better because there aren't so many people on it. Today, with so many people streaming movies, I am sure that the demand is sky-high, as compared to when people were surfing the web, chatting on AOL, and checking their email.
We bought an antenna from Amazon that reaches something like 50 miles (Bobby can be more exact about this part), and when our 2 year contract with DirecTV was about up, we cancelled and paid the cancellation fine. I never watch TV and Bobby only watches a few shows on the television, and otherwise he uses his iPad and watches movies or TV programs on either Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime videos, and this works out great for us. I think that Bobby cancelled both Netflix and Hulu, and Prime has so many other benefits that we would never consider cancelling that one. We rarely need it, but we can also use the hotspot on our iPhone should we need to do that, and it is a good thing to have in case a person loses their internet connection.
We only have one ISP available where I live unless we buy a bidirectional satellite hook up. We could get a cellular hotspot, and my son has one of those and is happy with it, but they don't use a lot of data. I can get several channels with an antenna for TV, but the TV comes with the DSL at the moment, so it is cheaper to use that than change our internet plan since we are grandfathered with an old cheap plan that is no longer offered. We may be forced at some point to upgrade our internet, but I will go completely to an antenna and Firestick should that happen.