It's a computer miracle!!!

It's been a tough week!! We had internet connection problems again!!

After four days of dealing with Tech Assistance at Verizon and finally giving up in frustration, I spent most of yesterday pricing out other providers. Then, this afternoon, the system completely fixed itself!! Magically, without human intervention on our end!! It's a miracle!!!

Tech Assistance insisted in the end the other day that we had hardware problems. My husband is an Instrument Technician, though not trained on small home computer systems, he has some knowledge in the field. Even I, untechnically trained as I am, felt their answers made no sense and did not jive with what the problem appeared to be.

We insisted it had to be something Verizon was doing on their end - basically a coding problem. We could access the internet but we could only access Verizon websites and e-mail. All other sites brought up a message stating access was being denied by verizon.online. Another term used was "walled garden". Everything indicated they were intentionally blocking access to other sites. The techs (Yes, we went through several.) stated that was not possible.

First they were convinced our modem had died and overnighted us a new one. Apparently, when they don't have any other answer they replace your modem. The new one arrived but does not work at all. We reinstalled the old "outdated" one. Our original is so old, they simply advised us to pitch it as opposed to turning it in. Their third (or 4th, 5th or whatever) guess was that our browser had stopped working and was denying access. (Funny, it worked for Verizon owned sites.) Since we have multiple browsers installed, we switched to a different one.

After Verizon gave up on us and advised we needed to contact their "advanced" tech support department where we would be charged for assistance, The Big Guy took a breather and debated about simply switching carriers. I began playing around, blindly changing some settings within the control panel. In an earlier two-hour phone session, one of the techs had talked me through changes on just about every setting. (I already admitted I'm not technical.) I did something right as I got our Firefox system up and running, although it had a few limitations. It would work for a bit and then the Verizon blocked access image would appear and require rebooting the computer to get around it.

Suddenly, today, it began working perfectly again. In fact, the other browser works well, too. Our service is actually better and faster than it has been in months. We're still using the old modem and we made no hardware changes since yesterday. Apparently, whatever the problem with Verizon's access codes was there, has been fixed.

It's a computer miracle!!!