One two occassions I’ve had to call NetSpace, my new ISP, because the Intertubes went away.
On both occasions, I was on hold for quite a while – 40 minutes, Thank the Lord and Maker that He Invented handsfree telephones. On the second call the support guy helpfully pointed out that they could have called me back if I’d pressed “1”, and then clarified that I wouldn’t lose my position in the queue. Mental note for next time. Trouble shooting in both took more than a half hour, and assumed that there was a working Windows box in the house – that was a bit of a stretch.
Both calls to NetSpace were for the same problem – Authentication Failure. No, we didn’t forget the password to the account. For the first call, it appeared that the problem was resolved when the modem settings were altered from the factor default (and ISP specified) PPPoE to PPPoA (VC-BASED); the second required changing the account password, and changing it back.
This does not bode well, and I expect there will be a next time.
What am I meant to do when my home phone is a VoIP phone?
Interesting. I am also with Netspace and I had a similar problem to the first one you describe (needed to change the modem config from PPPoE to PPPoA) a few months back; it was working fine before then. And a few days ago I had problems reaching anything on the Internet *except* Google services (search, Gmail etc. were working fine). I tried rebooting the modem and, what do you know, authentication fails. I did not call them – waited a while, ended up going to bad, and it was all fine in the morning.
That said, I’ve been with them for over two years with *very* few problems. But I learned never to call them unless problems last for a while, as the hold times you describe are not unusual. The “press 1” trick is something I’ll have to remember.
Netspace (and a bunch of other ISPs; apparently it was linked to an upstream Optus problem) had a major outage on the evening of June 2nd.
If you can get online in any way during an outage, one of the best sources of info (no matter which ISP) is the Whirlpool forum.
Sounds like a dodgy firmware on the modem if you have to reconfigure your password. I think we had lots of problems with our Netspace supplied Netcomm modem in the early days until I set up my wireless AP with DD-WRT and used that as a router doing PPPoE and the modem is just a bridge passing the PPP frames onto the router.