I had tons of problems with Internet connections (including connecting to AlfaBB) while traveling in NZ earlier this year. The main reason for such problems are time-out conditions that depend on the path length (i.e. the number of hops the signal has to travel through from your computer to the server and back), the speed of your Internet connection, possible congestion on any link segments and, the load on the AlfaBB server. In serveral cases I had to re-load the page more than once (by refreshing or hitting F5).