I think it’s fairly safe to say that having a reliable internet connection in my home is pretty important to our household. For one, I work from home several days a week. In order to do so I connect through VPN, and those can be pretty finicky. Krystalle’s job is also dependent on us having a decent internet connection. Not only does she write for a weblog, but she writes for a weblog about an online video game. If she can’t get on to play that video game, she can’t exactly write about it.
Then there’s the entertainment factor. I’d say that about 80% of our household entertainment is delivered via the internet.
I have business class cable service in the house, and on the whole have been very happy with it. Recently, though, we’ve had periods of brief downtime that have been incredibly annoying. From everything I can tell, they pretty much started around the time that I upgraded our Netgear Wireless B router to a Linksys Wireless G router with Speedbooster.
Which amuses and frustrates the hell out of me, because Linksys is supposed to be the bee’s knees, yanno?
The other day I called my service provider to talk about our connection issues, and during that conversation they informed me that according to the modem records the connection had been stable for 26 days. They also mentioned that there had been some problems with Linksys routers. I made the decision while talking to them to upgrade our service.
I’m now paying 30 dollars a month more, for what is supposed to max out as 12MB down/2MB up service.
We’re still having intermittent moments of packet loss.
So this morning I made the decision to purchase yet another router. I’m going back to Netgear products, and I should be receiving our new Wireless N router tomorrow.
We’ll see what happens.