Ah, the sweet fast Internet is back at Chez Boca.
Late Thursday [1], the Internet here at Chez Boca went bonkers (that's a technical term). One second we were smoothly surfing the Intarwebs and then the next, we smacked against the concrete pylons of a pier (if I'm to keep with the surfting metaphore). The connection wasn't down, and it wasn't as if there was massive packet loss. It was just that each packet was taking, on average, about eight seconds to traverse the link.
Things would be fine for a few seconds, maybe enough to start loading a page but then—**BAM!** 10 seconds! 8 seconds! 11 seconds! 4 seconds! For the next few hours or so. Then then latency would drop to around 30ms (milliseconds) for a minute or so, then the multisecond latencies would drive right back up.
And the packet loss was usually less than 2%.
It was weird and annoying.
When we called our ISP (Internet Service Provider), we were first told that someone would be available to check on Tuesday, but when Bunny suggested to tech support to look for any cancellations, they were able to find an opening for today.
It turned out to be a bad DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) port.
In looking back over our nearly 30 hours sans Internet, it's amazing how dependent we've become on it just being there. No email. No Netflix. No quick Google searches when doing a crossword puzzle. No MyFaceGoogleLinkedSpaceBookPlusIn.
Okay, that last one isn't bad at all.
But the rest … wow.