I have DSL service (3Mbps down) provided by the local telephone company, Frontier. I have just assumed over the past few years that the service was flaky, experiencing drops in the service at seemingly peak usage times during the day. This was usually fixed by a reboot of the DSL router. About ten days ago, we not only lost Internet service, but our phone service also was down. After calling Frontier to come out, they determined the problem was inside our home. Service in the home was restored once I disconnected all cables from the DSL modem and disconnected the phone line from the Directv reciever. I then rewired the telephone jack leading to the DSL modem to ensure connectivity and proceeded to experiment plugging and unplugging every network connection in our home. The results of the experiments were that when the Ethernet connection on the Directv receiver was attached, after 20 to 25 minutes, Internet service to all devices on the DSL modem was not available. (Wireless and wired). This was not experienced with any other connection in the home (wired or wireless). The receiver has not been connected to our DSL modem since this time and our Internet service has not dropped once since.
My question is whether anyone else has experienced this problem? Perhaps we need more bandwidth? Perhaps our receiver is flooding the DSL modem/router with requests that freeze it up?