June 8, 2023

Is Cable Internet Too Much Like Cable?

I’ve been having a weird problem with a particular DSL connection lately. It would seem that I can’t access certain websites hosted in the Dallas area. The bigger problem is that these are MY websites!!

At first I thought they were down, but not according to my live 3rd party web stats (and thankfully my Adsense earnings are still growing too.) It seems other people can access the server as well, just not me.

So I used a proxy site (looks like I finally found a use afterall eh?) and the sites load fine.

Next step: tracert. That’s where things got interesting. From my computer, all but 2 hops before the timeout are sbcglobal hops. From everybody else’s, the route varies sometimes.

This leads me to believe that our DSL is using static routing. That is to say, similiar to a cable or phone line there is only 1 path from computer a to computer b. It’s not even trying to route around the downed sbcglobal server in the path. When thinking about making a change, read this post about the benefits of business broadband.

It seems to me that this is contrary to how the internet was designed. Has anybody else seen this problem before?

About Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones is an SEO from Detroit. By day he works as a manager of SEO & Analytics at SapientNitro where his team performs SEO for Fortune500 clients. By night he's either playing hockey or attempting to take over the world with his own websites - which he would have already succeeded in doing had it not been for those meddling kids and their dog. The views expressed here have not been paid for and belong only to Ryan, not any of his employers or clients. Follow Ryan on Twitter at: @RyanJones, add him on Google+ or visit his personal website: www.RyanMJones.com