The Internet is Down

This week I have changed my regular routine and am flying to California on Tuesday instead of Monday. That is because I will be flying home on Friday so I can attend my company's winter hackathon. That means I spent Monday working from home instead of being at the office. Things were going well and I got a lot done until all of a sudden the Internet stopped working. I had a virtual private network (VPN) into my office and it immediately told me about the problem. Then I checked on my personal computer, which is not connected to the VPN and it had a problem too.

Having my home Internet down really cut into my immediate productivity. Rather than worry about troubleshooting the problem, I just turned my work phone into an Internet hotspot and kept working. Unfortunately that meant the rest of the house still couldn't use the Internet but I was the only one home and so it didn't matter. When my wife got home from work, I let her know that we had a problem and she remarked that we had a Comcast truck in the neighborhood and he must be working on it.

I headed up to dinner and we still didn't have an Internet connection. At this point I felt an obligation to troubleshoot the problem as it was irresponsible to head to California without fixing the issue. The first thing I checked was to make sure our signal booster had power. Not all Internet connections require a signal boosters but ours does (thanks Comcast). A tripped circuit breaker has caused problems in the past. Then I reset the cable modem. That didn't change anything. Ultimately I just needed to wait for the Comcast technician to finish his work as that really turned out to be the problem.

Sometimes there is nothing that you can do when your Internet is not working. You should be proactive about solving the problem though. One more thing I could have done is to call my Internet service provider and asked about an outage in the area. If you do end up calling and a technician comes out, don't be surprised if you get charged for the service call should it be determined that you are at fault.