"Elsewhere in this thread, you mumbled something about your internet
bill being part of your telephone bill. That means your ISP is
probably AT&T (also known as the evil empire)."

Evil empire is right, and in fact that is why we use cellular for all long distance. And they are not an evil empire, they are a monster from hell. Got chopped up by the Sherman anti-trust act decades ago and just grew up bigger. All that really happened was a bunch of lawyers got richer.

The MODEM was just changed in the last year or so. It is impractical to go look right now but luckily I had the manual on this laptop. It is a Pace 4111N.

"If it helps, I prefer to be more diplomatic when I'm being insulting.
No, it doesn't mean that I'm advocating your departure from s.e.r. "

Well if you did want me gone to most liely would not be offering advice on me keeping my access, which I do appreciate. However I do question everything. Later I will seek out your tools and bring back whatever SNL numbers or whatever, but I doubt that is the problem.

Reason being is that all other internet access is just fine, and I know how to coax it to reload rather than just rereading a page from the cache. This only affects Usenet, and actually I couldn't get it for abiout a month. I called ATT and the guy didn't even know what Usenet is, so I explained it.

Then, as it does now, it seems to just fix itself. Sometimes IE seems to connect better but at times I get the same errors. When it was down for a while I couldn't get Thunderbird to conect reliably, and by the time it did it seemed like Google did as well.

I'll get whatever numbers I can, in the meantime, the install is thus - the telco wire to the MODEM comes directly off the interface box on the side of the house. All other things on the line have filters. (a few newer things don't seem to need filters anymore, but they gotem anyway)

The master PC is a MAC and something I would rather not touch if possible. It has the typical RJ-45, as does the upstairs PC which is pretty new, Win 8.1 I think. My downstairs PC is offline right now because of a damaged CAT5 cable that is getting new ends crimped on. Hopefuilly that will be up by Friday. It is a 75 footer. Hopefully it works because I like having internet by the bench. The PC I am on now is the only one on wireless. However, when Usenet was down on this, the downstairs PC was still connected and had the same problem. So I doubt it is a problem with the wireless itself.

Now when I go to do this connection quality test, do I specify where to look ? Like would I have to point it to Usenet ? I have learned a few things aboutt he internet but obviously not enough, but any weak link in the chain from here to damnear Timbuktu could be causing this problem. Like there used to be a website called like "speedtest" or something, but when you went there you accessed their servers etc. and you got an ideal speed based on connecting to them, not just any other resource on the web.

Now after a few years ago with all this talk of throttling, I wonder if "they" would actually like Usenet killed. Many of these groups are unmoderated and cannot be moderated. they do not like that and we know it. I am not much into conspiracy theories but when you got people from government, industry and media going behind cosed doors to talk about **** they do not want us to hear, and their goal is clearly to enrich and empower themselvees at the expense of everyone else, what the hell are we supposed to think ?

But I am not going into that **** because of what might just be a few errors or poor maintaining or whatever.

I still would like to know why IE can access this but FF cannot.