Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Verizon's Router has issues when you connect 3 or more devices drops Internet Connections

Recently I have been working from home for often and got another computer connected in my LAN network. After this change I started noticing internet drops very often. So I contacted Verizon Technical Support (let me say that I hate Verizon’s call centers, you have to enter a hundred keys to get to the right agent). Any ways, tech support did some trouble shooting and made changes to the router etc. Problem still persists.

I called again, they send a technician to troubleshoot it and he just replaced the router and was out of the door in less than 5 minutes. OK it was fine for 2-3 days and then the problem again.

I called tech support again and yes again they send over another technician which he just change my router from Ethernet to Coax cable. It was good for 1 day and then the problem as still going on. The internet was dropping every 5 minutes. It was actually recycling the entire router powering itself on and off. I had three machines connected via Ethernet cable and 2 devices on the wireless network. Normal activities except for one machine which I might be transferring 1-2 Gigs of data, but noticed that the drops were occurring even If I wasn’t at home, as long as the computers where connected the internet was dropping. By this time I was already in the 3rd router.

Technical support sent another technical and he stayed for a while until he visually saw the drops himself. This time he decides to replace the box outside and put in a brand new router (same router of course Verizon only carries one type of router). Any ways I believe it worked at least for 4-5 days and Yes again the same problem. This was a nightmare I could not do my work and it was embarrassing with my clients when I had video conference calls and online meetings since it will drop my internet connecting on random times.

Frustrated, I called Technical support again and they put their Special Team on the line and said that it might be a problem on their central office so they said they were going to change me to another slot. That probably means to another server. Not sure but it worked for 1 day and still the same problem. Finally they send another technical to my house again and said dude you have 4 computers connected. I am like “So” it’s a router it was four Ethernet ports it’s mean to handle that. And he responded “Normally not a lot of people use all ports, they have 1 or 2 computers connected”. I asked if Verizon had another router perhaps the business account might come with a different router and he said “no, it’s the same router”. So it occurred to me that it’s possible that the router had an issue since they had replaced almost everything from my house to their central office. I decided to connect an ether hub and plugged in all my devices there and only connect the hub to the Verizon router and that did it. Since then connections have only dropped 1 or 2 times, still not a perfect solution but what am I doing to do. They are the only ones that have the speeds that I want.