Frustrating Internet Providers

We always like a smooth surfing and easy access to internet. Most of my time needs a lot of bandwith. Since Saturday, the connection of Smartbro becomes too frustrating. It is not only that of the inefficiency of the said provider to fix the problem but the time spent to report the said problem. Since day one of the lost connection, I have started to report it but it takes a lot of useless procedure because they already know that the problem is in their system. Every time I called them surely they will ask what is your name, what is the reference number, is this name the one reflected in the account, what is the ip address, what is the physical address, unplug the motorola device, disable and enable internet connection, clear your internet history, delete all temporary files and after it they will give you the report number to be follow up after 24 hours without telling you the problem. Even my smart phone was disconnected several times during the conversation. I observed also that it will take you almost to eternity before you can connect.

In one of the internet forum, this problem was been discussed. One of the members, ian was able to check the smartbro server and this was the report:

DocMana [0] has provided a lead. In his blog post, he lists Smart
Bro's DNS servers:

121.1.3.208
121.1.3.199
203.84.191.216

I did some quick tests (sample below):

$ dig @121.1.3.208 +verbose porttest.dns-oarc.net TXT

; <<>> DiG 9.2.4 <<>> @121.1.3.208 +verbose porttest.dns-oarc.net TXT
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 58122
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;porttest.dns-oarc.net. IN TXT

;; Query time: 241 msec
;; SERVER: 121.1.3.208#53(121.1.3.208)
;; WHEN: Mon Aug 18 05:18:16 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 39

Ideally, porttest.dns-oarc.net [1] should return a rating for the DNS
server's source port randomness. The DNS servers above, however,
refused the query (might be because the admins set them to be
non-recursive). While not conclusive in itself, it should provide a
lead for Smart Bro engineers.

For Smart Bro users, you might want to perform the tests described in [1].

[0] http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-0OCENX4haau1oA38TsiK4DP2YLk-?cq=1&p=290
[1] https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/services/porttest

One thing is sure, the problem does not lie in the subscriber's. There is something wrong with the smartbro internet connection. Please do something about it and please do not put your subscriber to a tedious processes of checking especially when you know that the problem is in you because not all are technically capable of understanding checking the ip address and such.

For now, I can browse some sites but not all. I will contend for the moment to receive the message "problem loading page" and "server not found".


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