Can’t wait for service provider’s tech to come out – they’re using cold weather (in Louisiana!) as an excuse to cancel today’s appointments.
Anyone smart about this stuff have any clues? It went down like this: yesterday morning, all worked great. Yesterday around noon, the modem (or router or whatever it is – same thing? Or close enough for the non-technical?) just stopped working cold. When I tried to connect to the internet, I got a gateway authentication error.
Got on the phone with a tech. Unplugged/re-plugged everything, including power to the modem/router. Reset it. Reset it again. Repeated everything. Still nothing works. I have a big black brick on my desk.
How do these things suddenly fail this way out of nowhere? And why can’t I fix it myself without specialized knowledge?
Power-cycling it is pretty much the only thing a non-technical person can do.
If the lights come on when you plug it in, it’s unlikely to be a fault with the modem itself. It’s possible there’s some connection issue between you and your ISP that you have no control over.
If the modem is well and truly bricked (no lights come on, even with power and input), then it’s time to replace it. If you’re leasing it from your ISP - well, you shouldn’t do that, if you can afford one yourself. Head down to an electronics store and buy a modem that’s compatible with your ISP.
Just to be clear, is this the cable modem which has the cable coax as input and you plug the ethernet cables into it? Sometimes people think a router and a modem are the same thing. While the functions can be combined together, they can also be separate boxes.
Does it have lights on the front which indicate status? Typically there will be 3-4 different lights which mean different things. Find the model number of the modem and look up what the lights mean. Depending on what it thinks is wrong will tell you how to proceed.
Lights come on, and the modem/router (what is the difference, anyway?) is about two months old. I guess it could be a lemon … but the ones before it lasted a few years apiece. :shrug:
No coax cable in this unit, though there is a male jack to plug one in. It is connected to the wide Internet by what I believe is called “VDSL” – it comes into the house as one thick white wire that has two split “phone jacks” on the end.
There is also a place to physically connect the device to a laptop with an Ethernet cable, but we don’t use it. Everything is connected via WiFi.
Even if the lights are on, you have to look up what they each mean. Often they will have different colors or blink depending on what they mean. So one light could be green, red, green-blinking, red-blinking and each different state would mean something different. Each light also indicates the status of different features, like power, cable-input, router-connected, internet-speed, etc.
The simple difference between a modem and a router is like this:
A modem takes a signal that’s not on an ethernet cable–such as from a telephone, cable, or satellite line–and converts it to ethernet.
A router takes lots of ethernet connections and sends them to the modem. These ethernet connections might be from ethernet cables or from wifi.
The VDSL line you have coming in has some special protocol on it. You couldn’t just hook it up to your computer. The modem you have acts like an interface between your computer’s network and VDSL. It sounds like the modem also has a built-in router, since it offers wifi and some ethernet connections on the back.
So look into the meaning of the lights and their state to understand what the modem is having problems with. It might say that the VDSL signal is missing, or that the wifi isn’t connecting, or something like that.
Then our device has to be a modem. It’s quite a bit bigger than modems used to be 7-10 years ago, so maybe it’s got some router-type features built into it.
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Service provide has just let me know that there is a localized line outage that is affecting many customers in the immediate area. I asked if that meant there was a fiber-optic (?) line that was physically severed or otherwise damaged. The tech was unable to confirm the specific nature of the line outage. But I guess it doesn’t really matter.
That probably means they don’t recognize your router. They have to link a router to an account, and something has gotten borked. It’s like the router forgot the username/password. When you said you did the reset, was that the factory reset with the little button you have to use a paperclip to press? If that didn’t fix things, then the modem must have some other problem.
You mentioned the area outage, but I would have expected the modem to indicate that no signal was present in that case. Maybe there’s some neighborhood router which is broken, so it sends a signal to the houses, but can’t connect to the company to validate the logins.
As to why they fail, my uneducated opinion is that they don’t manage heat well in those devices and that causes failures. Wireless routers fail way more than any other computer device I use. I’ve had printers for decades, but if I get more than 2 years out of a wireless router I feel lucky. If this is the company’s modem, they may have looked at the economics and decided that making a device which craps out every few years is actually cheaper than making a device that lasts a long time.
Yep, except they’ve improved the ergonomics a bit – the reset button is actually a small red button you can press with your finger. No paper clip required.
At this point there are too many unknowns. The modem (VDSL) part may actually be fine, and it’s just the wireless (router) that is down.
I would recommend:
getting a (standard RJ-45 plug) ethernet cable and connect a computer to the modem/router.
The router should have a “home” page. Usually something with an address like 192.168.1.0 or 10.0.1.10. You can google the model of your modem/router, and probably find the “home” page address.
The “home” page will typically have some type of “status” page or indicator. This can show you if you are even connected to your ISP or not.
If you connect with a cable and can’t even access the “home” page, then your modem is probably toast.
If you can get to the “home” page, it may give you some insight into where to check next - if you’re not connected to the ISP it may be the modem, or the network that you’re connected to (not a problem with the modem at all).
If it is just the wireless/router, connecting via cable would at least get you internet access for the one computer.
Gateway Authentication Error is usually a problem with the broadband connection. This will either be a line issue or a problem with the router itself. It MAY clear up with a reboot of the router but if it doesn’t there’s nothing you can do.
By the way…a modem is the thing that allows you to get the Internet in your house. It modulates/demodulates data to send it back and forth over the wires. The router connects to the modem and routes data to all the different devices that share data.
Used to be that you (people in general) just had one modem connected to one computer. Then people got more computers, or more likely wanted wireless, so you had to add a router to route the wireless signal to the devices that wanted it. You’d get the modem from the internet company and if you wanted to have wifi you’d buy your own wifi router and hook it up.
Now there’s a lot of combined modem/router (wifi router) boxes that come from the Internet company. It’s a bit of a pain for the customer sometimes, to be so dependent on the internet company, but easier sometimes too because the company is in charge of the modem and router and can more easily serve you. If you had two pieces you might not know who to call about the problem.
Not sure I can … I’m on an employer-owned computer with a lot of under-the-hood settings locked down. Besides, that had never been an issue with the previous wireless modem/router device – nor with the current one since I set it up in November.
Basically, I’ve been able to treat the WiFi access the same as hard-wired Ethernet access. Never heard of manually assigning IP addresses. Might be a best-practices thing … but really, do many non-technical people do that? Is it the kind of thing that the service technician would offer to do to help things work better in general?
BTW, non-technical people CAN install and set up this modem/router right out of the box. It was very, very easy.
I only meant that if you were going to directly connect to the router to access the default configuration page, you may have to do that. Other than that, it just works on its own, assuming DHCP is set up right.
