Your Internet connection quality can have perfect quality or poor quality and everything between. If your Internet connection is perfect – no news is great news!
If your Internet connection is less than perfect, it is very frustrating. Browsing the Internet works, but will occasionally freeze. Loading pages will slow. This is because connections are timing out and retrying, or pictures and links are failing altogether.
The good news is that if you are browsing the Internet or retrieving e-mail, you get a new connection to the Internet for pages you display, and connections for photos and ads from other sites. They connect and then disconnect when the display is complete. Browsing the Internet does not depend on a perfect connection, not even a good connection, but just a fair or even poor quality connection for browsing the Internet.
High performance connections like Microsoft’ Remote Desktop Service and things like Voice-Over-IP phone systems are continuous connections to achieve optimum performance. These continuous connections make an initial connection and expect that connection to be maintained indefinitely. This is not an open-and-close connection like browsing the Internet.
If your Remote Desktop connection is interrupted, or your printers are interrupted to our Software-as-a-Service servers, this is due to an Internet connection quality issue where your Internet connection distribution changes at the user end point where nationwide fiber optic connection changes to cable or DSL at the user’s local connection.
Nearly all problems with the Internet are caused by the local Internet Service Provider’s (ISP’s) final cable feed, or DSL feed such as AT&T U-verse, into the building.
The cable feed to the building premises can be buried or suspended from utility poles. When cable gets damaged, the cable doesn’t transmit the signal efficiently and its power levels drop quickly. They drop so low that it is very hard for the cable modem to distinguish between the zero-values and the one-values. The modem will request for the server at the other end to retry, and it can try it again several times before it completely fails. Retrying greatly reduces your Internet performance and ultimately causes disconnections.
The most common type of damage is a cut in the cable which completely interrupts service. These can be repaired. However, the repairs themselves degrade over time. The repairs get exposed to water, which freezes and thaws in the winter, which quickly degrades the repair. Winds that swing the overhead cable lines loosen the connections. Harsh summer sun degrades the insulation at the repair. Birds and squirrels playing on the lines place tension on the lines which degrades the repairs. It is common for many repairs to exist on the line that feeds your building premises.
DSL connections, particularly with AT&T U-verse, can be any of three connections.
Our servers are connected immediately to the Internet fiber optic backbone through the highest continuous quality fiber optic connections, using redundant fiber optic feeds through independent bandwidth carriers such as AT&T, Level(3), Time Warner Telecom, Cogent and Cox Communications. This high level of redundancy provides continuous access and server uptime.
Your local Internet Service Provider (ISP) will have you to reset your modem and try again. This is rarely the solution. A technician from your ISP should come to your premises for a “line check”. They can test the power levels on your cable or DSL feeds. They can also review the reconnection and retry log that is either logged in your modem, or logged in the local ISP’s servers which they can review for your account.
It is very common for the local ISP to replace the cable line which leads to your building premises you’re your connection is cable, this may involve a new 50 foot or replacing a line that is 250 feet or more.
Once the degraded cable repairs are replaced with a new unrepaired line, your connection will be continuous with high performance. You will not notice frequent disconnections, reconnections or loss of printers. This is how it should have been working all along.
If you are using DSL that is the common old fashioned implementation as described above, you should consider replacing DSL service with cable or Fiber-to-the-Premises DSL.