Internet trouble!

[AledJ]

Hope someone can help! I'm using the t-mobile stick broadband and last night had a text saying I had gone over the bandwidth limit. So 2night when I get to work I log onto msn click the emails waiting for me, but it won't load the page (it partly goes through the load process) So I click on some other site bbc, hexus, amazon etc and they either load (but all i get is a white screen) or they take an age to load. I'm sure it no virus as Kaspersky has not alerted me to any (got a trojan blocked last night-but that was it)

When I diagnose the connection in vista I get: Cannot communicate with DNS server (then an ip address) Now could this all be to t-mobile putting a huge cap on my usage???

Also it does say:

IPV4 connectivity: Internet
IPV6 connectivity: Limited

No idea what that means!

Have done two virus scans and nowt!! Only thing that turned up was Kaspersky being over protective and saying itunes and some other programs could be vulnerable. When I last used the net on my laptop (this was between midnight and 7am- wednesday) all was ok!

This is really confusing me!

Edit: Everything is back to normal! This has just hit the final nail in the coffin of t mobile for me! Contract runs out start of next year (thank god) However, I still get 'Cannot communicate with DNS server (then an ip address) ' if i diagnose the connection- any ideas on that?

[nightkhaos]

Okay. A few terms need to be explained, and then a few concepts.

1) IPv4 vs IPv6. TCP/IP is a standard of Internet Commication. However, the most widely used standard, IPv4, has a limit of under 4 billion different top level IP addresses (IPs within a LAN behind a NAT are not counted, only the IP you have when you face the internet. IPv6 is a version to fix this problem which has far move combinations, however it is in the process of being roled out, and very few companies support it at the moment (worldwide). And that is what your diagnoise tool is telling you, IPv4 is connected and working but IPv6 is not.

2) DNS server, or Domain Name Server, is a machine that takes requests for a URL and returns a record which contains the relevent IP address (and other information) in order to access any files on that URL, thus allowing you to fetch a document at a any URI within that URL.

Now, a few concepts. Most connections have two DNS servers, a primary and a secondary. The secondary is used just in case the primary goes down. Your problem seems to be that you are trying to request a URL from the primary, but the request times out, hence the dianogise tool says it cannot commicate with the DNS, but then when it connects to the secondary, it gets a response, and can THEN load the page.

What you need to do to fix this problem, is call up T-Mobile and request them to tell you their DNS servers and manually define them, or grab some free DNS servers off the web, this will likely fix your problem.

Another important concept is the DNS cache. When your computer recieves a record from the DNS server, it will record it on your HDD and will refer to that rather than try and grab it again off the DNS server. This allows the system to load pages quicker.

[AledJ]

Cheers nightkhaos!! Thanks for explaining all that think I now understand it a bit more. As I said everything returned to normal after i disconnected the stick and re connected it.

I just hope I don't get connected to an Indian call centre- can't understand them