An Internet Connectivity Reprise

I've been having some connectivity issues lately. My Internet connection seems to be up and down, up and down, and whenever I call my provider (Cox) about it, they do a remote modem re-set. Sometimes that fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, if it fixes the problem, it fixes it for five minutes, other times for five hours.

The thing is, usually the problem is specific to reaching certain sites/servers. I can reach, hypothetically, CNN or xHamster (thought I'd throw in a little spice there), but might not be able to reach Bing ... or my own shared server hosting account/sites.

This morning, that particular thing tickled my memory, and since I was stuck and unable to work anyway, I decided to see what happened if I connected over ProtonVPN (yes, that is an affiliate link -- if you purchase their premium services, I get some credit toward the costs of my own email/calendar/password manager/storage/VPN account).

Hmm ... hours later, I haven't had a single problem reaching any site I wanted to reach.

I'm considering letting Cox know about that, but that old memory tickler makes me think it wouldn't be worth it.

When I lived in St. Louis, my ISP was Charter. One day, I noticed a Charter truck down the road and workers going into and coming out of a manhole. I got an email notification that my services might be down for some fairly short period of time while they did an "equipment upgrade," and that's what happened.

But, when the service came back up, I could seemingly reach any site on the Internet ... except Rational Review News Digest. Try to reach the front end or the back end of the site, no dice. Just churned and eventually gave me a "can't reach the site" error.

That site being one of my daily workplaces, it was a problem. But I quickly discovered that I could reach the site via a proxy connection, and a little checking around told me that everyone I asked was having no problem whatsoever reaching it by normal means.

So, I called Charter several times, explained the problem, and got told that the problem was obviously with my computer, my cache, my browser, etc., that their systems were working perfectly well. thank you very much.

This went on for a week or so. Then one day I noticed a Charter truck and workers parked at the same manhole cover as before, and 15 minutes later I could reach my damn site. Hmmm.

I don't really mind using a VPN. In fact I should probably use a VPN most or all of the time. But, I think you'll agree, I shouldn't have to use a VPN just because my cable Internet provider has a misconfigured node or whatever.