On Monday we started having issues with our internet at home. Some sites we could access fine, but others we could not. The problem was still occurring on Tuesday so I called Clear and nothing was wrong on their end. I unplugged the modem and router and still the problem occurred. Today I decided to plug my computer directly into the modem and voila, I can access all the sites again. So, it was now time to figure out what was wrong with the router, which is a D-Link DI-624 for what it is worth.
I started getting worried that the guy I bought it from might of hacked the router and was tracking everything we were doing, including our user id and passwords. Some of the sites that we could not get to were ones that required login access like gmail and banks. Yes, the guy I bought the router from was quite a bit on the shady side.
After some searching, I came across an article from 2005 (man, that seems like a long time ago) where a guy was having the same problems with the same router that I have. The solution was to change the MTU number. And I am sure that your response is the same as mine – what the heck is an MTU? Basically, this indicates how much data the router can receive at a time. Apparently there is an upper cap of 1500 and that is what most routers are set to, including mine. Apparently even though my router is set to this, it has decided that it does not want to accept this information at once so I now needed to find the new amount that it was ok with.
I found another article from DSLReports that allowed you to ping their site using different MTU numbers so you can figure out which value is the right one for your router. It turns out that I had to drop mine to 1400 and everything stopped working again. Yeah!
In a way, this gave me an idea of what it would be like if net neutrality did not exist and, boy, am I glad it does!