Looking for a new ISP.
Community Forums/General Help/Looking for a new ISP.
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| Hey, It appears I am in need of a new Internet Service Provider. My current one, Earthlink, appears to be on its way out :( I get booted off sometimes while surfing the internet, and now I am having trouble connecting. Fairly often when I try to connect I get an error message that there was no answer from my provider. (I have dial up by the way) Anyways. Do any of you have any suggestions as to a quality ISP that I should try? I live in the US, in California. I know of AOL, but have heard that they suck. Other than that, I really don't of many ISP's. Thanks! WERDNA |
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| I strongly disbelife its your isp. i rather think is modem or copper cable error. ISP now days uses FIberOptic and dose not often have such problems. To fix problem try another modem from a friend. If its a dialup try connect from another friends house. Have you done a traceroute to comfirm its a isp or a ping test ? i used to have modem before i got a real LAN to fiber connection and i never gona move no more :) |
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| What kind of connection speeds are you getting? If they're on the lower end of the spectrum, bad wiring could very well be an issue. Also, be aware that depending on what the issue actually is, switching ISP's may not make a difference at all: The vast majority of them no longer have their own modem banks, but are using virtual POPs where the large telco's operate banks of modems in a central location, and forward the TCP connection to a zillion different ISP's after the connection is established. There will be dozens of companies that advertise internet access in your local area, but the vast majority of them will be answered by the exact same rack of modems somewhere. you may wish to find out if your new ISP has a (free?) trial period before comitting to a contract, to see if using them resolved the problem. |
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| Dialup? why?! |
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| You can sign up for a free Netzero account and find out if it's your modem or Earthlink. I think they only allow 10 free hours a month but that's more than enough to answer the question. |
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| Ok, thanks guys! I'll try Netzero, and yes, I do have dial up with an average internet speed of about 5 kbps. Although it could very well be bad wiring, and that would absolutely suck :( How do I do a traceroute? Or would that have no point for dial up? Thanks again, WERDNA |
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| You should upgrade your internet for the sole purpose that you're using dial-up. Then again, that may not be an option if you live in a rural area. |
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| If you get 5KB/sec then the quality of the line itself isn't that bad -- although one catch: If the line quality *fluctuates*, it may get too bad for the modem to maintain and result in a disconnect. There are a lot of sources of interference: for example, using your microwave could mess up the signal enough to result in a disconnect... Or perhaps when your neighbors use their phone it introduces some cross-talk on your line resulting in the disconnect. the modem handshake will determine the fastest speed that your modem can talk to the modem on the other side. If the call quality isn't consistent, it may re-negotiate a slower speed, or will disconnect it the signal degredation gets too much. One workaround for intermittently crappy connections is to force a lower connection speed in the first place. Yeah, it sucks to make your dialup even slower, but if it works more consistently without all the hang-ups it may still be a tradeoff that's worth making. There are modem initialization strings that can lock a modem to a lower speed. Your internet provider's helpdesk should be able to tell you which strings to use for your particular modem, and where to enter them. |
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| I don't think AOL offers dialup plans anymore and they may not even offer internet access at all. They may have switched solely to being a content provider. |
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| GfK (Posted 3 hours ago) #4 Dialup? why?! I don't know why either, but that probably explains the 3 hour gap between WERDNA's first post and Wing's post. It probably took that long for the message to get to the forum . :P |
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| I have no choice but dial up out where I live. It is my sole and only option :) |
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| You sure? Even if you don't have DSL / Cable internet locally, there are often other alternatives these days like EVDO (cellphone-style broadband: Verizon, AT&T. up to 1.5Mbit or so), directional wireless to a local ISP (more expensive setup-costs), or even satellite based (hughesnet etc) Oh, and there IS another option that may help, over dial-up: If you have two telephone lines, you can get a so-called shotgun modem that establishes two dialup signals at the same time. Doubles your throughput speeds, plus is more stable since you can drop one connection but remain online on the other while the first one re-dials. (Of course, your ISP also needs to allow you to be dialed in twice at the same time. Technically you can, but it depends on your ISP whether or not they allow you to do so on your current plan) |
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| I've been toying with the idea with junmping ship from Tiscali to Virgin - an extra 5MBits blah supposedly. |
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| (Pretend Im an Old Chinese Lady) Oooooooooo -Dial up bad for the soul! (OK, back to normal) AT&T offers high speed over a digital phone line (You have to have newer wiring by your house) Also, Google BPL |
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| Found out what was wrong! It wasn't my ISP at all(just like some of you said:) I appear to have glue in the socket that my phone line plugs into. The socket was taken off at one point for repairs, and then glued back on, so I can only assume that the glue melted in the extreme heat we have been getting and ran.(Or maybe puki just put it in) And I believe that we can get DSL, but it would cost a lot of cash that we don't have right now, so for now at least were stuck with dial up. (Which really isn't too bad, it just takes longer) Thanks again for your help! WERDNA |
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| Everyone makes fun of Puki. No wonder why he glues in youe phone lines. Click a link, go make a game, back to FireFox, click... PS In FireFox: Press F6, type about:config In the search box, type pipe Enable network.pipelining by double clicking it. (I have max requests set to 7) |
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