There are few things more frustrating than your internet being out. Especially if you run your business from home and rely on that connection to the web. Actually, there is one other thing more frustrating than that – having to deal with your internet service provider to resolve the issue. That’s when you call us at Priority!
I had a call from a client the other day, who had lost internet access after a particularly nasty storm and lightning strikes. He had dutifully called his service provider (I won’t mention any names), to report the issue, and they sent an engineer out, who later texted to say that the issue had been fixed. But, he still had no internet. He then decided to call the company that made his router to see if that could be the problem, but they maintained the router was fine and put the blame back on the internet service provider. Sick of the blame game and still not having any internet, the client called me.
Network Troubleshooting 101
Armed with a laptop, a test router, a spare ethernet cable and a usb network adaptor, I arrived at the client’s home with all I needed to begin narrowing down the issue. Firstly, I set about checking that the problem was affecting wireless devices, as well as the client’s main desktop PC. After checking with him if he had any other devices (phones or tablets) that connected to the internet on a day to day basis (he said there weren’t) I tried to connect to the wireless network on my phone. No dice. Nothing.
Next, I logged onto the client’s computer and into the router interface. As well as the lack of anything happening with the router’s DSL light, there was also a big “No internet” warning on the homepage of the router’s interface.
Now it was time to rule out a dodgy ethernet cable between the router and the PC, so I swapped the existing one out with one I’d bought. Nothing.
As I knew the outage had initially occurred during a bad lightning storm, I also wanted to check the client’s network port hadn’t been fried. So, into device manager I went, disabling the onboard networking. Plugging in my trusty usb network adaptor, I hooked it up to the router and…still nothing. Onwards and upwards.
Next up it was time to try my test router, and see if the problem lay there. Hooking it up to my laptop, I went about the setup, inputting all the relevant settings that related to the internet service provider’s standard router settings. After a re-boot of router and laptop, we waited and…you may have guessed it, no internet.
By this point, I was seriously doubting the issue had ever been fixed, when the engineer said it had been. It was it nearing time to give the service provider a call and escalate the issue. But not before two final troubleshooting steps which I thought I’d get out of the way, as I knew it would be one of the first thing’s they’d want to check when I called them. First, I took the router and splitter to another known, working phone jack and tried that. To no avail. Finally, I swapped out the splitter with another one, just in case. Nope, wasn’t that either.
Time To Make The Call
After a mercilessly short time listening to hold music I was speaking to a less than cheerful sounding call centre assistant at the service provider. After going through all the steps I’d taken with him, he still wasn’t convinced that the issue was with them. After a brief conversation with the client as well, it was decided that they would open another service ticket and send an engineer out.
Fast forward a couple of days and I called the client to see if there had been an update. He happily informed me that all was well and he was back online. An engineer had called him from the exchange (on a Sunday morning, no less) and within a few minutes found a fault and fixed it. Second time lucky. Ahem.
My client was of course overjoyed, and was very grateful for my troubleshooting and that I’d managed to act as a bridge between him and what he called the “tech people who talk a different language”.
