The BBC kickstart

12-04-2007

Give your internet connection a kick with the BBC web site

I have no idea why, but on many occasions I have lost my (cable) internet connection. This is not limited to a wireless connection because it also happens when I'm hardwired to my router. Maybe I've left the computer alone for 20 minutes, or I've watched a DVD on my laptop. Although I remained connected throughout, I find that I've since lost internet access. The browser does not find any of the web pages I type in, I cannot access my email, I cannot update any of my security products, nothing. Logging off and back on again does not always work, neither does a reboot of both the PC and router. Strange.

Even stranger is a solution to this problem that I discovered, and I have absolutely no idea why it works.

I remember reading once that the BBC's web site was the most popular site on the web. I thought about this and figured that it must need a lot of bandwidth, hardware, and redundancy in order to handle all that traffic. If that is true, its more than likely to be available all the time. In other words, it will never go off-line. So I added a bookmark in Firefox to news.bbc.co.uk. The next time I lost my connection and nothing worked, I clicked on the bookmark and voila, the page loaded! After that, everything else could access the internet again.

So now when I lose my internet access because I haven't used the connection in more than 20 minutes, I press my BBC bookmark in Firefox and it comes back. Sometimes I have to press it twice, but it always seems to kickstart my connection. I still don't know why.