If your hotspot's ever been hit up here for connectivity problems...

...or if you're getting complaints of no backhaul from your customers now, here's a hint as to a possible cause.

Over the past weekend I experienced here at home what that great Occidental philosopher Yogi Berra would probably describe as "deja vu all over again." My DSL connection, which in a year and a half of operation had never failed due to anything wrong that wasn't on my side of the modem, suddenly reminded me of a couple of hotspot visits I've described here. You know the drill-perfect connection to the access point, textbook handoff of a good IP address from the DHCP server, so on and so forth-but nothing beyond that. Try to hit Google and Firefox grinds and grinds before timing out; open up Thunderbird and it's the same story with your mail and news servers and RSS feeds. I reset the router-no change. Plugged my laptop directly into one of the Ethernet ports on the switch-same thing. Well, so much for the AP or the switch being the problem.

And one by one, I eliminated all the other possible causes between me and the wall, except one-the dual-input DSL filter that the ISP provided with its self-install kit to go between the wall jack and modem, so the jack could simultaneously be used by the modem and a phone. Removing it and plugging the modem in directly brought Google and my incoming spam back in their full glory.

The filter's demise really wasn't a great loss, given that I only plugged it in so I could continue to have my ancient desktop computer's dialup modem connected to the phone line, but I haven't used it since I got DSL anyway. And besides, I still have a spare filter if I need it. But I relate this tale just to remind everyone of what I shouldn't have forgotten myself, after a decade of supporting end users: It's the simplest things that are the most likely to be the source of the problem.

So...if your hotspot's been dished here for anything that sounds like what I've described, or if your customers are doing the dishing because they can't get YouTube with their yogurt-or whatever-try removing your DSL filters one at a time, especially if you've got your modem plugged into one. You might get lucky.

And by the way, if you're an operator or patron of a location that has been cited here in the past for issues since corrected and you think it deserves a second chance to impress, so do we. Just drop a comment or e-mail any of the contributors. We'll come by and check it out when we can.