So today I was bitching all over Twitter about my connection. Or the lack thereof. It got to the point that poor Timothy from P1 called me and received quite an earful from me. The things that I know about my connection is thus:

Connection dies during school holidays
It’s a pattern that’s solidified over the months, but it’s rarely been this bad. The last time it was this bad, I actually more or less screamed at them. The problem went away around 2 WEEKS later.

Apparently it’s no longer a base station issue
Turns out that it’s not just high congestion, but also high data packet loss. I forgot to ask them what causes this.

So what’s a pseudo geek to do?

Troubleshoot of course! Note this applies only to Windows operating systems only. I just uninstalled Ubuntu, so I can’t check there, sorry!

First things first, the most important thing to do whenever you face a connection problem is ALWAYS run IPCONFIG. This is done by going through the Command Prompt.

The easiest way to do is to click on Start (the Windows logo on the lower left corner of your screen) > Accessories > Command Prompt. Note that if you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7, you should right click on the Icon to “Run as Administrator” before you proceed.

Once done, you should see a black window pop up. Now, type the following code:

ipconfig

Theoretically, you should see only 4 items there:

Windows IP Configuration
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::d823:79df:2294:4620%11
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.1.1.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.1.1.254

If you see this PLUS something that looks like a tunneling adapter, then there *might* be a problem. Particularly if you see something like “Tunnel adapter Reusable ISATAP Interface” or something that says “Tunnel Adapter” in general. The closest entries I can find online regarding these items is that they’re used mainly to help transit BUSINESSES from IPv4 to IPv6. At this point in time, as far as I know, for the home user, there’s no reason to install this.

So if you’re not afraid, it’s time to get rid of them. You may want to do a System Restore point before we continue (google that one yourself :p).

Now, head into Device Manager. You can access this via Start > Control Panel > Device Manager. Click on View > Show Hidden Devices. Now, scroll down to Network Adapters. Double click twice to see the full list of adapters. If you see something along the lines of Microsoft ISATAP Adapter (especially if there are more than one!), and Teredo Tunnelling Pseudo Interface, then try disabling them. Restart PC and connection, and see if those works.

Otherwise, you might want to consider changing your DNS servers to OpenDNS (I know that P1 suggests Google DNS but I get a faster pingback with OpenDNS, and I was trying to ping Google!). This worked for me, but only for a short time. Right now I’m trying to disable IPv6 to see if that will solve the problem, but at this point in time I am highly doubtful.

So in other words, if after all this fails, go back to screaming at P1. x_x