I am having quite some issues with our internet. We live in a rural area where landline broadband and cable internet are unavailable... we are actually in the woods surrounded by farms!
Our only option for broadband at a decent price is "wireless broadband". Essentially, it is radio/cellular signal (as far as I know) that is sent to a receiver from a tower and then converted into internet. We were going with one company and were only receiving about 200 Kbps download. It cut in and out, and obviously went very slowly. So, we decided to shop around and see what else we could find. We found another company for less money per month and decided to switch. According to speedtest.net, we get MUCH faster speeds with this new company, usually between 1.75 and 2.5 Mbps. It really was too good to be true, though.
A day or two after we got this new internet, the provider told us he had to switch over some equipment and the internet would be down. No big deal. Standard stuff. So the internet eventually comes back up and all seems well, until we realize we can almost do nothing we used to. We can browse the internet very quickly, just like the speedtests show. We cannot connect to anything but web pages though! Yahoo euchre (or any game servers for that matter) - we can't connect. It just times out. I play games and chat online. I can't connect to any logon servers for any games. America's Army 3, LIVE for Xbox/Vista, Enemy Territory, etc etc. I also cannot connect to a friend's Ventrilo server... well, i take that back. I *can* connect... after waiting 10-15 minutes. I'll hit "connect" and it just sits there for said amount of time until it FINALLY connects. Once its connected, ping is low and there's no lag. But everything else times out before it can wait for so long to connect.
So, i would really like to get this fixed. One thing i do know is that when my ISP switched equipment, he actually changed who he got his internet from. It at first said "Charter Communications" when we ran speedtests, but now it says "Verizon Business". It also says we are in Illinois, but we live in Michigan. >.>
One friend suggested it could be the router, but i can confirm that it is not the router. With the old company, we had no problems. Now we have this new company with the same router and all this happens. I also went into the routers settings and did some port forwarding and changed the firewall settings with no luck.
Another interesting note is that when i use the windows comand (cmd) program, i can ping all said servers (game servers, Ventrilo servers) without any problem. The packet replies come quickly, but if i actually try to connect to any of them, it just times out.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. If you have any ideas on how WE could fix this or how it could be our fault, let me know. If you think it is nothing to do with us , but rather its all the ISP's problems, chime in and let me know that too. We have contacted the ISP a couple times but with no response... its a local company and run by one guy... hes always busy and it seems customer support and care are on the bottom of his list.
Thanks again!
