> This is strictly a matter of curiosity, as the problem has gone away without any
> action on my part.  For two and a half days, I had extremely limited internet
> connectivity... with odd symptoms unlike any problem I've experienced before.
> If there's any kind soul out there in POV-Rayland thinking "Aha! I recognize
> that", I'd very much appreciate any sharing of insight.
>
> Here's what happened...
>
> I come home from work on Friday to discover that my internet connection, which
> is provided via cable modem through a company contracted by my local
> municipality, is connecting very slowly to a few sites and timing out with all
> the rest.  On the POV-Ray site, for example, I could get the home page, but
> "Support" would always time out.  I did the usual restarts and checks, my system
> (XP Pro) continuously insisted my network connection was just fine.  "Ping" and
> "tracert" tests repeatedly returned normal results.  I spent nearly thirty
> minutes on the phone with a support tech who seemed reasonably competent. No
> other customers in my area were reporting similar issues.  We tried powering
> everything down and up (again), releasing and renewing the IP address as well as
> assigning a static IP address.  Nothing changed the connection status. We gave
> up and made an appointment for a physical service call.
>
> The situation continued throughout Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning I
> discovered that the connection was gone entirely.  I did yet another standard
> power down and up of the cable modem and, lo and behold, POOF! the problem is
> gone like nothing was ever wrong.
>
> Does this sound familiar to anyone?  If it happens again, is there something
> better to do about it than just wait patiently?  Thanks in advance for all
> replies.
>
> Best Regards,
> Mike C.
>
>

1) Did you ping with the regular 64 byte packets, or did you also try 
larger packet sizes?  If your line is noisy, larger packets will be mroe 
enclined to suffer from it, statistically speaking.  This is why a ping 
test can look ok, but loading a web page is troublesome.

2) How was the weather like in your area on friday?
2.b) was there any power interruption?

3) Did your customer service rep mention anything about signal/noise ratio?

I ask this because I recently experienced something very similar, and it 
turns out that the neighborhood signal booster died during a 
thunderstorm and the signal coming from my modem was so faint that 9 
times out of 10, they wouldn't even pick it up.

The CS rep also initially gave me the "none of your neighbors are 
reporting the issue" line, to which I replied, "of course... they're all 
at work.  I'm the only one in my area that works from home".  After a 
little digging, he found out that the non-VoIP in my area were all 
having the same problem as I did, and was able to confirm that VoIP 
customers have a different make of router, one that seems to be less 
affected by S/N problems.

Depending on your local carrier's network monitoring tools and the 
skills of their operations staff, they may or may not be able to link 
their network monitoring system warning them that booster unit AE-1135 
is about to lose battery power, with customer calls in the neigborhood 
of 243 Evergreen Terrace, so it's possible that their repair crew fixed 
the problem on the pole last night without the guy to whom you spoke on 
staurday knowing there was even a problem there to begin with.

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