QOTW: When was your broadband last down?

[HEXUS]

And how do you rate your provider in terms of overall reliability?

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[Gentle Viking]

It was down rather long ( some hours ) not long ago, but in general all the different connections i have had over the years ADSL / cable / fiber have been pretty steady, for sure no need to be launching complaints with support.

[g8ina]

Been with VM 100MbpS for nearly ten years, and only been down twice (significantly) in that time. Last time was prolly 3 yr ago.

[Friesiansam]

It was down for an hour or two a couple of weeks ago but, that was first time in many years.

[Jonj1611]

With VM, was down a few weeks ago, apparently our socket in the cabinet burnt out.

[excalibur1814]

Slow news day.

[Iota]

18 Days. Only because it needed to reset to increase the speed. Again.

[Saracen999]

QOTW: When was your broadband last down

Day before yesterday. A couple of hours worth of down.

Sort-of.

It dies regularly. Or putting that differently, I notice it's died regularly. I've no idea how often it dies and I don't notice because I'm not there, and/or not trying to use it.

Often, when it dies, it comes back of it's own accord in anything from 5 mins to a few hours, without interference from me.

Sometimes (very infrequently, to be fair) it vanishes for up to two or three days, and all I can do is wait.

But there have also been a number of occasions where it's apparently died, and I wait, and wait and .... get fed up and reset the router. Given 5 mins or so to reboot, when the (cable modem)/router comes back up, either by strange coincidence it got remote fixed in that 5 mins, or the reboot brought it back. This happens sufficiently often (several times a year) that I don't buy the strange coincidence hypothesis.

So just reboot the router, right? Well, no.

Rembember I said it often somes back on it's own? Not, in all cases, if I've rebooted the router. Then, it appears to not find the rebooted router .... until I reboot it again at which point, perhaps by strange coincidence, everything is working.

It appears to sometimes lose connection because, I don't know, IP renewal crapped out orsomething. In which case, rebooting works.

But if it's down for some more fundamental reason, having rebooted it actually prevents it coming back, until and unless I reboot it again. The trouble is, there's no way to know whether a reboot will cure it or make the problem worse, short of trying it. So, how long do I wait for it to cure itself before rebooting? Act to fast, and it makes it worse, But wait, and I could be connection-less for hours when all that was needed was a reboot and five minutes.

Who is it? Virgin.

[Kovoet]

I'm with Virgin and it goes down weekly. But since this lockdown it seem's the norm. Just don't even bother trying to get hold of someone as you'll waste your time.

[pumpkin]

With Zen and lost the connection for seven days in December 2020 but it wasn't Zen's fault as such. Problem was with the connection in the box, on the pole, required a visit from BT and that took time to book, but was fixed quickly when he arrived.
So I had a week using the mobile to set up a VPN to work, as I'm a software engineer working from home. Cost a bit as the mobile only has 2.5Gb data a month. So had the second phone line changed to also have an internet connection, went for NowTV, and that actually costs less than just a phone.

[nar53]

We're well out in the sticks but we're lucky enough to have 1mb fibre into the house unfortunately the fibre comes via overhead cables which are always in danger from numpties in tractors or when they cut the hedges as the cables are often pretty low. If they do get damaged it can take two or three weeks to get fixed which has happened a couple of times. Other than that we get frequent outages from 10mins to all day but its great in between!

[Conman]

Last night. There's an intermittent fault on the line in the street somewhere, probably water ingress with the winter weather. Hopefully it can be traced by the engineer due tomorrow, but all's been fine today so they'll probably find nothing wrong!

[Norkay]

I've been with Virgin Media for like 5 years. Using their 200 package. I had 2 major outages, and recently my router reboots the connection almost 4 times a week. Once or twice during working hours, unfortunately.

Recently they wanted to bump me up to the maximum bandwidth available, which is ca. 350MBit, but I refused. I can't stomach paying more for a recently unreliable service and abysmal hardware they've given me.

I cannot word it enough, how bad their Hub 3.0 is. Unfortunately my ASUS router died a year ago (Wifi 5 was gone - a bane of ASUS routers, apparently), so now I'm connected via RJ45 to the router for all 4 PCs at home, and try not to get an aneurism when I have to use Wi-Fi.

The switch to RJ45 made me reluctant to pay over £200 quid for a router that would satisfy my needs. So am I happy? No. Do I have an alternative? No.

[Core2Extreme]

I can't remember the last time my home Internet was down. I think there was a brief outage in the middle of the night in 2018 or 2019? But IIRC that was planned maintenance. It's been pretty good.

More recently, in early 2020 the Internet at my office went out for a day. That didn't bring work on my project to a screeching halt as it did for some, as we all had self-contained development environments locally. But a lot of people either moved to coffee shops or home for the rest of the day.

That office building was pretty new though, so it was probably just a new-building problem. It definitely wasn't the worst new-building problem it had.

Edit: I'm in a city in the midwestern USA. Office building is downtown; I live in an apartment that isn't downtown but isn't all the way out in the suburbs either. The power goes out more often than the Internet (and that does take down my router as I don't have a battery backup), but that's also much better than it was 15 years ago.

[bae85]

I'm with Vodafone Fibre. I CANNOT WAIT for this contract to finish in May. It goes down regularly, over xmas and new year it literally went down EVERYDAY. The router they supply is one of the worst too (don't worry I got a new one!)

Luckily my street has just been upgraded with a 1/2 or 1 gigabit fibre connection from £24.99 a month, bye Vodafone!

[maxopus]

Plusnet dies for 2-3 weeks every year around christmas when there is bad weather but is rock solid otherwise. VM goes down for 1-4 hours a few times a year.