Directed towards technically minded people.

[Mike 03]

Is it possible for your internet service provider to cut or curtail you access to the internet individually--just me, or you, or an individual they don't like--or is it more likely that if your internet service is going on and off, in and out, it is not just what I am watching but something geographic or local affecting others as well?

From two this morning until 8:43 this evening I have been watching discussions on health care, and for whatever reason, my internet service has been unusually terrible.

[notadmblnd]

1. your modem may be going bad. if you're wireless

it could be your network adapter or adapter card.

[Mike 03]

2. Thank you, I will check that out. but it would be awfully strange. I have been online for quite a

few years now.

[nonconformist]

3. I have to reset my router from time to time.

Sometimes several times a day. It's annoying as hell. I probably need a new router.

Barring a router issue, you might just have a bad connection and/or they're having issues today. I highly doubt it has anything to do with what you are doing, unless you are uploading something and you (or they) have that capped to a certain speed or amount.

[Electric Monk]

4. It is totally possible, and ISPs do it all the time for various reasons.

One reason could be if you go over your monthly bandwidth quota (some ISPs have that, read the fine print) and another would be if they detect you sharing stuff you don't have a right to over p2p or bittorrent networks. There are probably other reasons too, but those are the most common.

[Mike 03]

5. It is probably nothing more than my own paranoia, but I appreciate the feedback

It was just so bizarre how my internet connection kept cutting out every time I tried to send an email about Healthcare, or something important came on with respect to these important hearings and mark-ups.

[gmoney]

6. Probably just good old-fashioned American incompetence and crappiness (nt)

[FarCenter]

7. Could be individual or a group of customers, depending on where the fault is

Typically there is a router and/or modem dedicated to you. With DSL there may be a cable pair dedicated to your all the way to the central office. With fiber/coax cable architecture companies, there would typically be a coax drop to your house. With fiber to the home Passive Optical Networking, there would be a fiber to your house. So if the trouble is in a component dedicated to your access, it would affect only you.

Beyond the dedicated components, there are component that carry traffic for multiple dwellings and businesses, with more and more dwellings affected as you go towards the telco central office or the cable company head-end.

The ISP could be throttling your traffic, but that is unlikely to be done intermittantly. There could be traffic congestion on the shared portions of the networks, especially cable companies architectures.

[gkhouston]

8. Yes, it's possible. Check with the neighbors. It could be that you've all been

experiencing special "service" :eyes: today.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. Are you using AVG antivirus?

And did it do an update requiring a restart recently?

On my PC and my wife's, that caused serious browser connection problems and intermittent e-mail problems as well. I had been thinking of uninstalling AVG and installing Microsoft Security Essentials instead. I did so on both machines, and that solved the problem.

AVG has caused browser connectivity problems before, and this was the last straw for me.

[Ignis]

11. Yes, the last few times finally drove me from AVG to Avast.

http://www.avast.com/

[eShirl]

10. we had a combination of several things at once that were doing that to us, took months to track down

we now have a new router, new modem, ISP service people fixed a faulty dsl line coming from the telephone pole to our apartment building (didn't cost us anything), and we found 3 other people were taking advantage of our internet connection for "free" wireless access - we fixed that by requiring a password for it.