Village Voice June July 19

SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH MY INTERNET?
That’s a phrase I have heard many times
when I answer the phone or open an email.
Normally closely followed by “and can you
fix it?”
The answer is almost always yes, but there
are some things beyond my control. Having
said that, a process of elimination will reveal
where the point of failure is and who should
be held responsible.
I say ‘which’ point of failure because there
are an awful lot of things that can go wrong
with an Internet connection. Thankfully it
works better than when we still used warbly
dial-up modems but it can still give
problems thank you very much!
Your Internet connection is made up of a
chain of devices passing information
between them at high speed. At least that’s
what it is when it’s working properly.
So, you want to see something online. What
follows is a simplified description of what
happens.
Your computer, tablet, smartphone,
whatever connects to your router. If it
connects using Wi-Fi or powerline adaptors,
there’s the first potential point of failure.
Often when people say their Internet is
down, it’s because of problems with Wi-Fi
signal, which can be fixed.
Next, your router takes your request for a
specific website and looks for something
called a DNS server. Think of this as the
Internet’s address book which tells your
router where the website you want to visit
can be found.
This is another potential point of failure
because if the DNS server can’t be found or
is not up to date, the website you want
won’t appear and you’ll get a browser error.
Some DNS errors can be fixed, but this is
more likely an issue for your broadband
provider.
If all is well, your router then connects to
the website and allows you to communicate
with the website server through the
company hosting that particular website.
This is a further potential point of failure
because the hosting company probably has
tens or hundreds of thousands of websites
on their servers. If something breaks or is
misconfigured, they may not be able to find
the website you want. When this happens,
realistically there is nothing that can be
done until it is fixed.
I’ve left out all the techie stuff that can go
wrong, but in some ways, when you
consider what is involved, it is a wonder the
Internet works at all!
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