Wifi trubs

Dark Raven X

Hey fellows, just got back home after a week away, turned the power to the PC n' such back on at 0200 this morning, and had the ol' Limited Access on the network connection. VirginMedia, my ISP, has been having blackouts recently, kinda assumed it was that. But it was still the case this morning, so set to work unplugging and jiggling all the wires and such. :P

Got to the current situation; I have the cable modem, then a router which is wired to the desktop. This setup = no internet right now. BUT, if I take the ethernet from the cable modem and plug it straight into the PC, I can get internet, intermittently. Seems I gotta jiggle the cable in and out to get it to work, which is worrying, but better than nothing.

So it's a problem with the router, right? I've tried restoring to factory settings via the http://192.168.0.1/ setup thing, and even done the hard manual reset on the case. Putting the router back in the circuit breaks it and I get no internet. The router still gets recognized as a network thing, wireless devices can connect to it no problem, it's just the part where it provides internet to them that breaks.

What can cause this? Do routers just suddenly die like this or what? I'm leaning towards getting a new one, but what if the router isn't the problem? I don't know why it broke in the first place.

AngelHedgie

First off, do you have any spare Ethernet cables? It sounds like the cable could be failing, and that's the first thing to rule out. Also, does your provider MAC lock? (This is pretty rare these days, to be honest.)

You can kill a router, but that's pretty difficult. (Usually, it takes overloading the poor thing device wise.) What you describe (especially the intermittent physical connection) is a physical failure of a cable or port.

Great Scott

Yes, routers do break all the time. Do you have another cable and/or another PC to test the Cable Modem with? It sounds like this might simply be a cable problem; if it's loose for your PC it might be loose for the Router, too.

Dark Raven X

when I say loose cable, I mean the broadband cable into the house - the spiked thing you screw into the modem. I only got connected by unscrewing the cable slightly, and finding a sort of sweet spot where I had internet access. The ethernet cables joining the modem to the router and the PC are all fine as far as I can see; I've used both of them to connect the modem direct to the PC and they each work. Guessing the ethernet port for the modem on the router is broken? Somehow? I mean, I don't understand what caused it to break. :I

EclecticGroove

AngelHedgie wrote: »

You can kill a router, but that's pretty difficult. (Usually, it takes overloading the poor thing device wise.) What you describe (especially the intermittent physical connection) is a physical failure of a cable or port.

I kill my routers ALL the time. I generally average about 2 years tops for a router/modem before they start going bad. Not even doing anything super out of the ordinary either. My most dominant traffic is netflix, and I don't even have much flowing around between my systems on network.

Despite all that... every 1-3 years? Pretty much guaranteed I will be needing a new modem and router at some point during it.

The current Linksys I have did pretty well, but it's starting to show signs as well (needing to restart it constantly to get the wireless to work again for instance).

WiFi is usually the first to go, but I've had it lock up and drop the physical ports on this and other models as well.

bowen

That's strange.

All of my routers are in the 10+ year range at this point.

EclecticGroove

I wish. Mine just crap out. Kept up on a table and off the carpet (and not stuffed into a non ventilated cabinet or anything).

They just refuse to last. Work fine up to that point however. The modem I think was my last apartment, but I haven't been in this new one long enough to know if the pattern will continue or not.

I'm thinking of just getting a decent LAN switch (like a 16 port or something) and just hard wiring the majority of my systems, then just popping off a fresh wifi router for the rest.


But anyways. That's derailing the OP. As others said, I think he needs to check the cable. As he mentioned having issues from the modem to the PC intermittently as well. It could be the cable or the port on either the modem or the PC.

Dark Raven X

Hehe, this ended up resolving itself as a VirginMedia engineer showed up and just handed me a new all-in-one modem and router dealie. Takes up a little more space, but it works, I have an extra plug free and I'm getting a stronger signal than I did with my old router. Poking around in the settings, this thing is a lot more flexible than my old router, there's a lot of things in here I've seen mentioned but never really had access to play with. Also supports Wireless N, gave it a go but a couple devices don't recognize it, so I stuck with the regular range.

Very happy with their response, they didn't mess around, engineer just looked at my old modem, said "yeah it's fucked" and gave me the new thing for free.

Kick_04

Well that works that it has been fixed that easily.

One thing I was thinking if while you were out of town there was a storm in your area... my parents have had bad luck with storms in the past, one time when I still lived there a lightning bolt hit neighbors house. It fried answering machine & cable box in living room, nothing else in the house was damaged.

Just this year my parents were out of town, I went over to dog sit & house sit. Internet, phone, & tv wouldn't work, though it worked that morning when they left. 3 days later guy came to service it and said the FiOptics box the ports on it looked like they were fried from lightning though no storms in days had to replace box and cable.