Network Failure

For days. Weeks. And months.

The issue has been there for quite some time and we kept thinking it was the problem of Starhub’s network at our estate that was giving us some network issues.

Windows Live Messenger was the biggest issue when we were chatting with friends and then it seemed that there was no reply from them. I personally was still thinking that probably the other party was too busy to reply. Oh boy, I was so wrong. Messages were kind of dropped and they didn’t even reached the other party when D actually told me that he didn’t received any messages from me at all when I had typed LOADS. So then Feng and I decided to carry out an experiment on our side and realised we can’t received each other’s messages after some time also. This sure was crappy. -.-

Then there was another issue of Feng’s connection timing out. Sure was another weird issue considering my connection was okie but his was taking forever to load. Of ‘cos that caused days of Feng being pissed off and I wasn’t too happy also. 🙁

Then D suggested some days back to try changing our DNS. And I did. At first it was fine but then messages got lost again. Nothing was improved on Feng’s side either. It started to dawn on us that it probably wasn’t Starhub’s network though we still have no idea what was the issue. Feng decided to experiment on his side to probably off his torrent during Windows start-up. Everything then seemed fine again but the issue of lost messages on WLM was still not solved.

Then 2 days back D suggested probably we should try using the router-modem given to us with another router instead to see if it is the hardware issue. Initially was still thinking to probably do an exchange with Starhub for their normal modem but decided to google more to find out how to use a router-modem with another router since am no network expert. 😉

So yes, as all network expert will know, you can use the router-modem as a bridge to a router. And of ‘cos when I googled the name of the modem-router given to us, I came upon a lot of negative feedbacks on Hardware Zone which goes way back to 2010. And someone mentioned using the router-modem as a bridge kind of solves the issue so I decided to give it a go yesterday after more researching. Went to get a router with Feng yesterday and came home to setup the network.

And TADAH! Our WLM was actually still sending and receiving messages from each other!!! Means no more missing messages!? 😀

That surely brought some joy to us after some days, weeks and months of lousy connection. Monitoring the network for a few more days to decide if we should still do an exchange for the modem-router.

So everyone signing up with Starhub for Broadband, please note to AVOID taking their D-LINK DCM-604 MODEM-ROUTER. Just do it the good old way of connecting up a modem and router so at least if there’s a need to test if the problem lies with Starhub’s network or the hardware, it’s easier to do so. JUST AVOID THE STUPID MODEM-ROUTER. DO NOT TAKE AT ALL COST.