There is really very little that can go wrong with a fiber connection. If you can not access the Internet the first thing you should do is to reboot your router. If you wish to reboot your residential gateway (the fiber interface box) you can power cycle that as well but prior to rebooting your router. If you are suffering from performance issues the most likely scenario is that your connection is either under attack from the outside through Email or a denial of service attack or, more commonly, because one or more computers on your network are infected with a virus or trojan. Here are a few tips that might help:
- Make sure your firewall does not accept pings (ICMP)
- If your firewall is not a commercial firewall make sure you reboot it weekly. (Not needed for commercial Cisco routers, SonicWall etc.)
- If you are running a mail server try to limit the bandwidth that server can use to minimize the impact of mail bombing.
- If you are running a mail server make sure you have no catch-all addresses that spammers can send Email to. Bounce all but legitimate, desired, addresses to minimize speculative Email spamming.
Fiber customers can monitor their bandwidth utilization using our online fiber monitoring tools. If you do not know your account information Email our admin staff and we will setup a fiber monitoring account for you.