QU: DSL, WiFi, ethernet, broadband, internet connections?

N

NancyNGA

Well-known Member
Location
Georgia
I don't even know enough to ask an intelligent question, but here's my best stab at it....

I have DSL service, a desktop pc, and a Netgear modem/router. My printer runs wireless-ly from the router so I know something is working.

Question: If the DSL broadband connection is down (say, due to a bad phone line), can the pc be switched to run wirelessly off the router, like the printer does?
 

NancyNGA said:
I don't even know enough to ask an intelligent question, but here's my best stab at it....

I have DSL service, a desktop pc, and a Netgear modem/router. My printer runs wireless-ly from the router so I know something is working.

Question: If the DSL broadband connection is down (say, due to a bad phone line), can the pc be switched to run wirelessly off the router, like the printer does?
Click to expand...

If it's like cable internet, then the answer is no, you couldn't run the PC wirelessly unless, you are able to connect to a wireless router outside of your network. For example, if my cable modem went down, I'd lose my connection to the internet. But, if my computer could somehow pickup a wireless signal from a Comcast tower, I'd be able to connect to that. Hope that makes sense.
 
Thanks, Bob. That makes sense. DSL service uses the telephone lines.
 

There is an alternative though if your normal Internet connection goes down. If you have a smartphone and your cell provider offers a personal hotspot service, you can connect to the Internet that way temporarily until your regular connection is restored. The personal hotspot acts like a wireless router and would use data from your cell data plan. You wouldn't want to stream movies using it, but for checking email, it's easy. But then again, if you have a smartphone, you could do what you need to do on the phone too without enabling the hotspot.
 
I'm happy to help with tech questions as are others here. My field was IT and I worked for startups and major corporations, but now I'm happy to sit back and not have to work with those crazy schedules, impossible deadlines, and demanding customers.

These days, one easy way to learn basic tech is to Google your question followed by the word "tutorial", and you may find some beginner tech lessons that are easy to understand.
 
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bluebreezes said:
There is an alternative though if your normal Internet connection goes down. If you have a smartphone and your cell provider offers a personal hotspot service, you can connect to the Internet that way temporarily until your regular connection is restored. The personal hotspot acts like a wireless router and would use data from your cell data plan. You wouldn't want to stream movies using it, but for checking email, it's easy. But then again, if you have a smartphone, you could do what you need to do on the phone too without enabling the hotspot.
Click to expand...

Thanks Bluebreezes. Somehow I thought maybe my smartphone could run off the hotspot at the house when I was at home if it wanted it to, so maybe the pc would too (duh.). But even if so, only if broadband service was working, I guess.

I'll read about the personal hotspot service. I really don't want fancy internet service away from home, just maybe to check email or the weather, etc, and I have to have a device that will fit in my pocket out in the woods. I just can't type on those small touch screen keyboards. I've tried for a year now. Too many mistakes.:rolleyes:
 
Yes, if you have a data plan with your smartphone, after enabling your hotspot, your PC would recognize the hotspot as a network to join. It works with your cell data service, and not broadband which is what you have with cable or DSL Internet.

Sounds like you have one of those pocket wireless routers. They're pretty neat too! I'm also terrible at typing very accurately on my phone so I try to avoid.
 
I should add.... I live in an old section of town. The phone lines are ancient. Every time it rains, DSL starts stuttering. It has to do with moisture somehow. I think maybe tiny cracks in wire insulation or connectors. One time the street light interfered with service. When the light went on the DSL went off, and vice versa. When power company fixed the light, everything was fine.:confused:
 
bluebreezes said:
Yes, if you have a data plan with your smartphone, after enabling your hotspot, your PC would recognize the hotspot as a network to join. It works with your cell data service, and not broadband which is what you have with cable or DSL Internet.

Sounds like you have one of those pocket wireless routers. They're pretty neat too! I'm also terrible at typing very accurately on my phone so I try to avoid.
Click to expand...
I gotta go read up on all this...got a lot of keywords to go on now.;) Thanks!

Plus the word "tutorial." :)
 
Fooling around with smartphone just now and turned on a mobile hot spot on the phone which shows up on the PC. Does THAT mean I could run the pc off the smartphone? (This is getting weird)

I got it! Unplugged Ethernet cable and if this message goes through it's working. It says I need to plug phone into power source. Gonna try the usb port on the pc. Wow!
 
Way to go, Nancy! Just remember that using your hotspot uses your monthly data allowance on your smartphone plan, so you may want to check it if you have to use it for very long just so you don't get charged any data overages.
 
I think I'll be fine with the data. Only going to use it when the DSL goes off or gets to flickering. I would imagine WiFi would be slower, but IDK.
 
Your hotspot speed would depend on your cell phone signal strength. You can test your speed via your DSL Ethernet connection or your hotspot by going to speedtest.net and clicking the Begin Test button. You'll get three results: ping speed (your connection to the server), download and upload speeds. You can test as often as you like and see if there's differences during different times of day.

I like to test my network speed if it seems to be sluggish to see if it's still in the range that my cable company advertised. If it's below for a couple hours or longer I reboot the cable modem and router, and see if that helps. That's my motto: when in doubt, reboot.

Beware there's a lot of ads with buttons to click on that speedtest.net site, but you'll be fine sticking in the middle section.
 
NancyNGA said:
Thanks Bluebreezes. Somehow I thought maybe my smartphone could run off the hotspot at the house when I was at home if it wanted it to, so maybe the pc would too (duh.). But even if so, only if broadband service was working, I guess.

I'll read about the personal hotspot service. I really don't want fancy internet service away from home, just maybe to check email or the weather, etc, and I have to have a device that will fit in my pocket out in the woods. I just can't type on those small touch screen keyboards. I've tried for a year now. Too many mistakes.:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I can't type on those devices, either -- just to type a few words takes me forever and frustrates me to no end, so I don't even try nowdays.
 
I count on the predictive text feature on my iPhone, which works very well most of the time. My sister and I play a silly texting game where we type random characters and then see what silly words autocorrect makes.
 
I've learned a lot (I think) from this new setup, but I'm never sure when it comes to new technology.

Internet access only through the smartphone, as a WiFi hotspot, is at least as fast as service ever was with DSL. Right now I'm still getting the stuttering from DSL, and when both are connected at the same time, service is not as good. It must be shifting back and forth?

The point is, if WiFi is this fast, I might as well rethink my whole set up here. I imagine the chances of getting AT&T to replace any telephone lines is probably zero, unless it is at my house. About to drop the landline anyway. Only get telemarketing calls.

I'm glad all this came up, and thank you again, bluebreezes.
 
When you say "both are connected", I'm assuming you mean that you have the DSL Ethernet cable attached to your PC, and your cell phone's hotspot is enabled and you have joined your PC to it. That would mean you have two Internet networks connected, but you can only use one at a time.

I'm also assuming when you say WiFi, you're referring to your mobile hotspot via your cell phone and cell service provider.

When you say stuttering, it makes me think you're streaming video. If not, how do you see this stuttering?

If you can look at your network connections perhaps in your control panel, you'll see that one of those is at the top of the list. That top connection is the one that's being used.

If you have both turned on and connected, I don't know which one would be at the top. They would not switch back and forth unless one of those networks went offline, that is, went down and was no longer available (even if temporarily). If that happens, the other network would take over. With networks, there's always some speed fluctuation so that's pretty normal.

If the fluctuation is large for an extended period of time (which would you document by using my previous suggestion about speedtest.net), then it's a good idea to contact your DSL provider. Tracking your speed helps you to see if it's happening at a certain time of day or perhaps other trends.

The main thing to be concerned about using a hotspot for any period of time is the data usage. Data usage overages can be expensive, but your provider should clearly list what the overage rate is. Typically it's stated as a price per GB, such as $10 per GB over for that month. I'd hate to hear that you got a $300 cell phone data overage.

Personally, I wouldn't leave a hotspot enabled all the time or as a permanent solution because data overages can be an unpleasant surprise. If your cell provider has an unlimited plan that would include the hotspot, be aware that after a certain amount of data usage each month, your speed may be de-prioritized so it may be slower. You'll want to contact your cell provider to get the details.
 
bluebreezes said:
When you say "both are connected", I'm assuming you mean that you have the DSL Ethernet cable attached to your PC, and your cell phone's hotspot is enabled and you have joined your PC to it. That would mean you have two Internet networks connected, but you can only use one at a time.

I'm also assuming when you say WiFi, you're referring to your mobile hotspot via your cell phone and cell service provider.

When you say stuttering, it makes me think you're streaming video. If not, how do you see this stuttering? ...
Click to expand...

Yes all those assumptions are correct. Don't worry about the data overages---$15 each additional GB. I'm keeping track. It's worth it, for a while, anyway.


By stuttering, I just mean the green light on the ethernet port connection on router is flashing, instead of steady. Webpages halt and load in spurts. (I made that term up.;))


Results of speed tests

Cellphone only: (Ethernet cable unplugged)
Ping: 62 ms
Download: 6.12, 9.59 mbps (two runs)
Upload: socket error, twice

Both cellphone & Ethernet:
Ping: 56 ms,
Download: 0.20 mbps;
Upload: 0.06 mbps

Ethernet only: (mobile hotspot on phone turned off)
Ping: 56, 267, 23 (on three different tries) ms
Download: 0.31 mbps
Upload: (0.27 mbps, error, error)

Hosts were from three different locations, if that matters.

Edited to add...

One more test. Green light stopped flashing on router. (Sun came out and phone lines probably finally dried out. Ha!)

Ethernet only
Ping: 90ms
Download: 5.77 mbps
Upload: 11.76 mbps
 
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Great information Nancy, and I like your methodical approach! You're getting decent download speed with your hotspot. Your DSL speeds are really awful, so I can see why you're so frustrated.

Just a comparison for the speed test, here's my own results just now for a pretty basic Time Warner Cable connection, which are slightly higher than the advertised speeds for the service level:

Ping: 56 ms
Download: 17.59 mbps
Upload: 1.17 mbps

I would lose my mind if my download speed was under 5 mbps, especially because I stream TV.
 
Thought I should follow up on this thread. Ruled out about everything I could without calling in AT&T, watched how things behaved for a week, and finally decided to go for a new router/modem. Troubleshooting websites and forums seem to imply the only way to tell if one is bad, is to get a new one and see if it fixes things. (well, duh ;))

Evidently that was the problem. It only got the download speed up to around 2 mbps consistently. But experience-wise it's now as fast as it ever was. There was a thunderstorm at the time all this started. The first thing the salesman asked me was if my old one got struck by lightning. (I kept the old one.)

Hope I'm not jinxing things by posting this. I should wait for the next heavy rain first.;)
 
That's great news, Nancy. I actually did the same thing earlier this year after realizing I'd had the same cable modem for 8 years and the tech specs had changed significantly in that time (and so had the minimum requirements from my cable provide). At the same time I updated my router. I saw an immediate benefit, not so much for speed, but in the consistency of the performance.

I like to live as frugally as possible and so held on to the older equipment for too long. I should've known better since I was in IT. Upgrading the equipment meant I was actually getting the Internet speed I was paying for and many less disconnections, so in the long run it was well worth it.
 
I'll add something else to this too. Last evening I got my monthly bill from my ISP and found that my rate had increased $10/month. That's not a huge increase, but based on Nancy's earlier posts, I looked at whether cancelling cable Internet and going with a mobile hotspot would be worth it. The rates for increasing the monthly data usage allowance with Verizon weren't too bad considering I'd no longer have an ISP bill, but then I looked at what my monthly Internet usage was with my cable company. It was a big surprise! On average I use 120GB/month. It's true I'm online a lot and I stream video for TV and play a PS4 game, but I didn't realize that my usage was at that level.

Seeing that usage made me realize that using a hotspot was out of the question since a hotspot data rate even coming close to 120GB/month would be much too expensive. The $10/month ISP increase seemed like a bargain comparatively.
 

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