It’s full-on winter season here in the NorthEast (FINALLY, some might say), and when blustery winter weather comes along, Internet and phone service issues usually come right with it.
Ice and wind are usually the biggest culprits when services go down, as above ground lines can come down when weighted by heavy icing. It seems that every year, we lose a few client T1 lines for a short period due to car accidents taking out phone poles. Although, to be honest, last year’s mattress fire in northern Massachusetts that took out some Verizon fiber was the first time any of us can remember losing lines due to THAT issue. And that outage still wasn’t as odd as the time a client in Rhode Island lost their T1 service due to a family of flying squirrels….
In any case, if you happen to fire up your tablet with your morning coffee and discover that your Internet service is down, or the first person into the office in the morning is texting you in a panic because they can’t check email and your servers are offline, restoring your Internet service may actually be a quick process that won’t even need to involve your ISP. Many times, minor outages can be resolved by taking a quick look at your equipment and determining the next step, especially with services like DSL and T1.
When your Internet goes down the first thing to do is take a look at the light status of your equipment – if it’s a DSL line it may be a modem or router, and if it’s a T1 line it’s most likely a router.
If all of the equipment lights are lit and solid – it may be that the router/modem is locked up and just needs a reboot. Power cycle the equipment, leaving it off for around 30 seconds, and then turn it back on. This will allow your router or modem to recycle and re-establish synch with MegaNet (or your ISP of choice). Sometimes, line issues caused by high winds, power outages or fluctuations, or overnight line work cause equipment to lose synch and most times a quick reboot brings everything back up within a few minutes.
If the equipment lights are lit and the external/WAN light is blinking – there may be a physical line issue somewhere between you and your ISP that isn’t allowing your T1 or DSL equipment to receive data from your ISP. We always recommend rebooting your router or modem in this case to see if it restores service, but if it doesn’t, your next stop should immediately be a call to your provider. Customers with dedicated monitoring from MegaNet (T1, fixed wireless, fiber, Metro Ethernet) may already have a call or voicemail from us, as our entire Support staff receives notification if a monitored connection goes down or has an abnormally high data error rate. But if your connection is down and a reboot doesn’t help, definitely call in.
If all of the equipment lights are out – your equipment is not receiving power, possibly due to a loose cable or worse, an equipment failure. In bad weather situations, frequent power outages/restorations can wreak havoc with electronic equipment, so hopefully your routers and sensitive equipment are plugged into a UPS to protect them, right? If not… you may need to wait for new equipment to be sent out/delivered to restore your service. Immediately check in with your ISP to see how to get things resolved, and get you back up and running.
