It seems every couple of years I am subjected to a
nightmare of a computer issue. Unexpectedly and inexplicably today, my wireless service stopped working.
To be more specific, the wireless light on my router (Netgear) was a solid orange, and no wireless devices could connect to it. My desktop, when connected directly to it, can open up some pages but not others (forums especially would not work, leading to server timeouts). When my desktop is plugged directly to the modem itself, it works fine, I can do everything. The issue seems to primarily be the wireless portion of my internet.
My ISP (Comcast) swears up and down that it's got nothing to do with them, even though last week they had to send a tech over to do tech stuff (as well as suggest to me to replace my out-of-date modem, which I did). The timing seems suspicious, but it does make sense: if the fault was on their end, I couldn't get internet period.
Several hours of factory resets and other nonsense, the Netgear people claimed my router was faulty and had to be replaced. So I did so, coming back to Best Buy just an hour later with a newer and (allegedly) better router. Guess what, same issue: a solid orange light and no ability whatsoever to access the Netgear Genie page (192.168.1.1). The help desk ran me through the same steps again, long story short I've thrown away nine hours into this shit.
So I'm completely stumped. The only options left are to return the router and get a non-Netgear brand, or hound Comcast to send another guy over. I'll probably do both, but I'm also making this thread to see if this awesome community can solve what several trained and certified tech people could not (no offense to anyone here with a similar job; I spent a whole 9 hours today trying to solve this issue so brain not gud naow).
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Take it back, and get a new one from the shelves. Open it in the store, use your phone or laptop to test it. Problems, grab another. You are only testing the ability to get a wireless connection and the Genie page at this point.
When you get home, you are going to have to talk to Comcast about getting them to configure things on their end. Yes, it sucks, but I did it after about an hour.
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I literally made no changes to my house's connection beyond swapping the old modem with the new one.
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Just to make sure, have you tried getting to the config page via 192.168.0.1? Some routers use that instead.
Two-story house, lots of devices, including several that stream (Apple TVs, consoles, etc). Don't want something unnecessarily expensive, but a good middle ground budget and performance wise.
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Mine is a Netgear (I think N900) WNDR4500v2. Has been fine for six months.
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This is a pretty good router. It's a little on the expensive side but it has a pretty decent wireless broadcast.
http://www.amazon.com/RT-N66U-Dual-Band-Wireless-N900-Gigabit-Router/dp/B006QB1RPY/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1407484984&sr=1-1&keywords=asus+routers+wireless
This is a bit of a step up, but it's also more expensive.
I'll look into the ASUS brand.
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The good news is that I can at least access the router's page (192.168.1.1), whereas I couldn't with Linksys. Bad news is that I still can't get an internet connection, with the page indicating as such.
Going to call Linksys about this, but after dinner. If they can't resolve it then I'm going to hound Comcast to send a guy over pronto, because there can't possibly be any other culprit.
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Anyway, everything seems to be working now...well, almost. This router is a dual band, which means it has wireless network connections, 2.4 ghz and 5 ghz. Based on what I've read, 2.4 offers a wider range signal, but 5 ghz offers faster speed at a shorter distance.
By that logic, anything that's downstairs would benefit best from the 2.4 option, but I couldn't get the downstairs Apple TV to stream anything until I switched it to 5 ghz. I'm wondering what the deal is and if I should just have everything connect to 5 ghz. I also set the channel to 11 for the 2.4 and the channel for 5 to 165, based on recommendation.
My current speed for my connected desktop using the router's speed test is 53.30 for download, 11.62 for upload.
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I'm going to demand Comcast send someone over, but I'm also going to research other internet providers to see if I can convince my family to subscribe to someone else. These frequent internet issues should not be the norm according to people I've talked to. I'm all for opinions on which providers offer the best internet service.
The one we're using now is Comcast Blast! (with an !): http://hothardware.com/News/Comcast-Increases-Download-Speeds-to-105Mbps-For-Blast-Internet-Service-Customers/#!bAGHFN
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Nothing wrong with asking a comcast tech to come out, but in my experience they tend to be hit or miss.
If plugging your laptop straight into the modem still gives you access to the internet and power cycling the modem and router gets everything running again you might be having problems with the modem assigning an IP address to specific MAC addresses. I'm don't know much about how that works but if you can plug your pc into the modem and it works, try cloning your pc's mac address on the router.
You can find your pc's mac address by opening cmd and typing "ipconfig /all", which will give a bunch of stuff including the MAC address which is labeled "Physical Address" and should be 12 numbers/letters. Your router should have a mac address cloning option somewhere where you can put in that number to make the modem think your router and the working PC are the same machine. Worth a shot anyway.
If you are setting up a large space like a house, then sometimes your wireless connection can just plain not work in some areas, especially if there are a lot of pillars, floors, angled walls, etc. etc. etc. At that point, it might be worth exploring getting a wireless bridge or even using something like a power-line adapter for some areas.
Is there a free program that can tell me how crowded each channel is? Beyond that I'm out of options. It's been working fine for me, but based on feedback from the other family members it's been slightly hit-or-miss, not as good as it used to be.
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If you have an Android phone/tablet, I recommend getting the WiFi Analyzer app. It's not perfect but it works very well for a free app. Just be sure to let it run for a period of time (a minute or two) and not just one-and-done it. Signal strength goes up and down pretty frequently, so sometimes a channel will supposedly be clear only to be overwhelmed by a single source 90% of the time in short bursts.
Most routers also come with their own analyzer apps bundled with the firmware as well. Linksys is a good brand, I would be surprised if there wasn't something you could use just by hooking up a laptop and logging into the router directly.
The best option is to simply cycle through each channel and test the results from all devices. Do it at varying times of day, just in case the interference is intermittent.
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Is there some special configuration I need to do to make it work?
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This is free, though I guess if you can't get a connection, it might be out.
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The wireless adapter on my Asus windows 8 laptop used to frequently shit the bed, and i'd have to disable/reenable that to get it to connect. try that on your mom's laptop.
I also changed the channel to 9, just randomly, and that seems to have improved things further. Just glad I finally got this mess sorted.
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Actually, 9 is a bad choice for a channel, because of how the channels divvy up the bandwidth. It's better to stick with 1, 7, or 14.