Connecting to the net & IP address

[Jiminee]

Afternoon lads

Been having some problems connecting to the internet at home lately - far as I can tell (and I am network challenged lets say) I have not been able to acquire an IP address.
Initially the problem seemed to be trying to use a Belkin modem while connecting to Bigpond - they would work for a while, 6 months, then just not be able to connect and the high level tech support - turn it off, hit the reset button turn it all on again, solved nothing so long story short, I finally got a new Bigpond modem yesterday. Ran through the install process on the CD and it connected fine. Turned it all on again tonight though and nothing - ran ipconfig and the Default Gateway was 0.0.0.0 (with the Bigpond IP address below it).

Anyway, get onto Bigpond and for once the turn it all off, turn it on again technique worked, of course who knows what they did in the background while this was going on and I am all connected now but does anyone have any advice for how to ensure my connection? Bigpond use a static IP address and this has been an ongoing, though very intermittent problem, for a number of months now but is it something with my computer or just garden variety Telstra incompetence/over loading of the system?

Thanks

[Dr. Pain]

The brand of modem should not matter. Have Telstra checked out the lines in your area? Often around where I live such problems are shitty connections and often it's a fault with Telstra. My mate can't get a good ADSL 2 connection where he is so has to go ADSL 1 to keep connection. Yet I'm 2 kilometers away and have no real problems with ADSL 2+. Our exchange gets heavy traffic which doesn't help so we get slowed in peak periods from 10 MB to 2 MB.

[Jiminee]

Happened again this morning but turning off the modem and restarting everything fixed it. I am sure it is shitty lines or a fault at the exchange or something.
being in a regional area I reckon they stopped upgrading everything a few years ago thinking the NBN was coming and well.........Now we suffer. I have gone from about 1.1 meg/sec of available bandwidth down to 0.42 meg/sec so there is something going on. But it seems to work for the most part so I'll stay with it for now.

[ysu]

It could be a crap modem, too. Mine does this disconnecting/dropping thing fairly regularly. (pretty much as you described) sometimes it drops speed then later it goes back up; then sometimes I just hear a "click" from the modem and the connection is completely gone, it has to do the rebuild it from the ground up. This one is a Billion. It has been replaced once, as it was crap, but this problem is a tough one to catch.

I've got the line/connection checked by 'node and they say the disconnection is initiated on my side - altho if it's some sort of crash I find it hard to believe they can tell 100%.

p.s. I'm pretty far from the exchange here, and my top speeds are around 5mbps, often closer to 0.5 though...

[Jiminee]

I have not had it drop as such mid session, its just when I turn everything on sometimes there is no IP address there for it to initiate the connection.
For some reason the Belkin modem had no way of dealing with this but the Bigpond one can with a power off / power on so wait and see for now I guess.

[ysu]

ah ok, I should have paid more attention.
Good thing if you can work it out!