When All Else Fails
If you've tried everything in this chapter and you can send and receive data on your LAN, but not to or from the Internet, there is an important tool that can help solve this problem. Every office (and most every home) has this tool: the telephone. Pick it up, call your ISP, and find out whether the problem is on its end. Simply dial the ISP's customer service line and be persistent.
Provided that you have thoroughly checked out your end of the connection first, never take "it's not our problem" for an answer. If it was working and now it's not, your ISP should be able to at least troubleshoot the problem from its end. If the problem can't be solved on the phone, request that the ISP send someone out to prove to you that the cable or DSL modem is working as it should. The problem today is that ISPs that provide broadband access to the Internet are growing so fast that it's hard to find qualified technical personnel to troubleshoot the customer problems that happen. It's easier to make you struggle through level after level of automated touch-tone response menus and then let you talk to some script-reader who just screens calls, looks up things in a database, and spits out a canned answer. Be sure you get through to someone who knows his stuff and can get the problem fixed.
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