If you haven’t already read our post about why your router often loses connection and requires a reboot, we recommend reading it here. This post looks at various ways to understanding why your internet doesn’t work.

So you always have to reboot your router, and the thought suddenly crosses your mind of “why does this keep happening?!” Well here are some steps you can take to help answer that question and determine if there are steps you can take to permanently make your connection better:

• Determine if you have internet connection at all – You can check internet connection by trying to ping a known IP Address that is outside of your local network. We recommend trying to ping 8.8.8.8 which happens to be Google’s DNS server which has been found to be very reliable. Open a command prompt on your computer and type “ping 8.8.8.8” (without the quotes) and see if your packets make it through or not. If you are able to successfully ping an external IP address, then technically your internet connection is working. If the ping fails, then your internet is not working. If you find that your ping succeeds, move onto the next step of “Perform a manual DNS Lookup”. If the ping itself fails, try a few other website URL’s and assuming they all fail you may need to take that issue up with your ISP…
• Perform a manual DNS Lookup – This will test your ability to lookup IP Addresses by URL (i.e. www.example.com). On Windows, open a command prompt and type “nslookup www.google.com” (without the quotes) and see if you get back one or more IP Addresses associated with that domain name / URL. On Linux or Mac you may need to use “digg www.google.com” instead. If you’re able to successfully resolve domains/URLs to IP addresses then continue to the next check of “Telnet Ports”. If your DNS lookups are failing, you can try a few different things. Try doing ipconfig /all in your Windows prompt (ifconfig in Linux) and look for the IP addresses of your DNS servers. Try to ping your DNS servers directly to check their connectivity. If they are found to be the problem, you can set your router to permanently use Google’s DNS servers instead of the DNS servers provided by your ISP. Just go into your router’s settings and set its DNS servers as 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. That should resolve a DNS server reliability problem.
• Use Telnet to determine port availability – If you can ping external IP addresses AND you can lookup IP Addresses from their domain names, but still can’t access things through you browser or another service, try this step. Sometimes an ISP may restrict access to certain services in attempts to throttle internet connection. They do so by blocking the ports that these services use. Port 80 and port 443 are used to deliver webpages with the HTTP service. Start by making sure telnet is enable on your computer (read more about Telnet here, including how to enable https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-telnet-2626026). Try to open a Telnet connection to your domain name of choice by typing in your command prompt “telnet www.google.com 80” and “telnet www.google.com 443” (without the quotes). If the Telnet connection is successful, that means those ports are not blocked. The Telnet connection is only useful to see if it can be established. Once established, the website would not be listening for any Telnet commands on those ports so no need to go anything else with the Telnet connection other than use it to see if it can be established. This test will let you know if the connection is allowed to pass through your ISP or not. If you can ping IP addresses directly, and also lookup DNS records but these ports are not available then that likely means that your ISP is intentionally blocking them. Constantly resetting your router may be the only solution for this problem other than asking the ISP to stop doing this (which they probably won’t if they’re trying to throttle customers).

Our Keep Connect product will perform all of these checks automatically while monitoring you internet connection and reset your router when loss of internet is detected. It will also text you when it resets and also why it performed a reset. For more information see https://www.johnson-creative.com/keepconnect