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How to check your Internet connection

Rob Pegoraro
Special for USA TODAY
A few basic troubleshooting steps can help you test your Internet connection.

Q: I think my Internet connection is down, but I'm not sure. How can I tell that it's not just me?

A: I suspect a great many Time Warner Cable subscribers were asking variations of this question when the No. 2 cable-Internet service in the U.S. suffered a massive outage across the country caused by a configuration mistake.

My first move when I think my own connection has dropped is to swear at the computer, then furiously click the "reload" button in my browser, then maybe shake my fist at the screen in futility. That rarely works for me, and I don't suggest you try it either.

Instead, take the following troubleshooting steps, and take deep breaths between each.

• Try clicking elsewhere. If a site as prominent as Google's home page doesn't load, you can be assured that the fault isn't limited to one company or even in a key component of the Internet's infrastructure like Amazon Web Hosting (which in the past has broken "AWS"-based services like Instagram, Airbnb and Netflix during outages.)

• Check the connections in your home. If your laptop is linked to your router via Wi-Fi, try plugging in an Ethernet cable instead.

• Reboot the router and then, if applicable, the cable or DSL modem. Sorry to sound like stereotypical tech support, but sometimes restarting the networking hardware in your home fixes the problem.

• Does DNS need debugging? Every now and then, an Internet provider's domain name servers — the directory-assistance system that translate requests for addresses like usatoday.com into numerical Internet Protocol coordinates — will break. In that case, you can route around the problem by using another DNS. Now might be a good time to bookmark the setup instructions for the free, alternate services of Google and OpenDNS: In each case, you type a few new sets of numbers into your computer or tablet's Internet settings.

• See what other people are saying. Search Twitter on your phone for updates from your provider's account or complaints about it. If it's a reasonably large company, see if it's mentioned on downdetector.com or the forums at BroadbandReports.com.

The troubleshooting step that should be on this list but isn't is this: Check your Internet provider's status page on your phone. Unfortunately, most of the big-name ISPs don't offer any such help.

The mobile sites of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T don't provide any obvious way to see if their services are working or not. Cablevision's Optimum does, but you have to log in first.

To see how that could work in an alternate universe, see the system-status dashboards of "cloud" services like Google Apps or Apple's iCloud. Or bring up the average electric utility's mobile site: Con Ed in New York, Pepco in Washington and Pacific Gas and Electric in San Francisco, among many others, have outage-map pages a tap or two away.

Tip: Your phone is probably already available as a backup hot spot.

If you need some emergency bandwidth, the answer is probably right in your pocket: Most of the nationwide wireless carriers include tethering, or the option to use your phone as a portable Wi-Fi hot spot, in their standard plans. But finding it can require some tapping around.

On an iPhone, open the Settings app and select Cellular. In Android, it depends. In a stock configuration on a Nexus phone, you'll find it in the Settings app under a "More…" heading; on a Samsung Galaxy S 5, it's behind a "More networks" item in the Settings app; on other phones, you may see a separate hot spot app.

The two exceptions to watch out for: Verizon's "Single Line Smartphone" plans (on which tethering isn't allowed at all, although I've had two VzW customer-service reps tell me otherwise in Web chats) and Sprint's single-line plans (on which it's usually $10 extra for a gigabyte's worth of tethering).

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

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