It all started a few weeks ago. My internet connection to certain websites such as my blog (tmsnetwork.org) and Wikipedia became very bad. Most of the time, I got the 'unable to establishing connection' error and I need to refresh the page 3 or 4 times in order for the web pages to load. Download speed is OK once I got connected, but 'creating' a connection is very hard. When I try to ping my blog, seems I got the 'TTL expired in transit' error at 58.27.103.233. 58.27.103.233 is belong to TMNet. Here is my solution: increasing the TTL value on my system, and so far, it works like charm! TTL or Time to live is a limit on the period of time or number of iterations or transmissions in computer and computer network technology that a unit of data (e.g. a packet) can experience before it should be discarded (Wikipedia).

To change the default TTL value in Windows XP or Windows Vista, open registry editor (go to Run, and type regedit). BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY BEFORE PROCEEDING! Navigates to 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Tcpip\Parameters'. Find 'DefaultTTL' (1). If there is no 'DefaultTTL', right click in the empty area in the registry editor, choose New > DWORD value (2), and name it 'DefaultTTL' (without the ' character). Double click 'DefaultTTL' and set its value to 128 (3). Restart your system for the changes to take effect. Try pingging the problematic websites again. If you still have the 'TTL explired in transit', try incrasing the 'DefaultTTL' value. You can increase the value up to 255.

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