So mysteriously a few days ago I began having problems with my internet access. Things would load slowly and Pandora was regularly cutting out. I couldn’t manage to complete an order in the online ordering system for a restaurant, but after calling them they said they were receiving orders just fine (just not mine). I called the cable company and their automated system told me to restart the computer, the cable modem, and any router. So I did that, in that order, afterwards running a speed test to see if the connection was better. From the title of this thread you probably can infer that resetting the last of these, our wireless router, caused the speed to return to normal. Before I reset it, I was posting test speeds of well less than a Mbps on a connection that could get 40, which it returned to after resetting the router.
How did my wireless router slow things to a crawl, and why did resetting it fix the problem? This isn’t the first time that resetting the wireless router has been necessary now that I come to think of it. In each case, the internet still worked, but was slowed to a crawl. What exactly was going on inside the router such that it allowed some traffic through but was throttling most of it? If resetting fixes whatever problem caused this, why isn’t it programmed to reset itself when there is no traffic? If my cable company knows it sometimes fixes the problem, I’m sure the manufacturer is aware of it too. Maybe it’s something that’s standard on a new wireless router but we’re using such an old model it doesn’t have that feature.
It isn’t so much that the router is necessarily slow, or that it is somehow throttling the traffic. It is possible but that isn’t the usual problem. A router does what the name says - it works out the route traffic needs to take. A home router has a pretty simple job, it typically has two networks to worry about, your home one, and your internet provider’s. It has to know how to send traffic between your various home machines as they talk to one another as needed, to know how to send traffic bound to the Internet out, and how to direct traffic from the Internet back to the appropriate machine in your home network. Sometimes it can get confused. When it does, it can start doing all sorts of stupid things, including sending traffic into the void, or just the wrong machine, which is about as useful.
Most of the knowledge it has about how to route traffic it builds up dynamically, and this information has a lifetime, so usually the router is up-to-date and old information is regularly refreshed. But nothing is perfect and routers can, either due to bugs in the implementation, or by oddities in the information it is given, end up with a corrupt dynamic configuration. If you were to dig into that configuration, it may well be possible to identify the bad entry, and fix it. But nobody bothers, as a quick slap about the ears and pushing the “help button*” on the back sorts things out far faster.
There are times when a bug in the implementation may cause the router to leak memory or similar ill, and it will degrade as well. Again, pushing the help button is by far the quickest answer.
Cheap home routers often don’t have their code tested all that thoroughly. Sometimes it’s as simple as long-running code having some kind of bug which causes a large number of packets to get dropped or fail their checksums. Then those packets have to get retransmitted, etc., causing things to slow to a crawl. Power-cycling the router reloads the firmware from ROM and the problem goes away, at least for a while. I find I have to reset mine about once a month.
(I’m assuming the router has integrated cable modem functions or similar). The router negotiates a connection speed with the rest of the network - it is often the case that on resetting, the device will try to find the optimal connection speed (which, incidentally, is why home broadband service offerings tend to use the term ‘up to x Mbps’) - the router will, for example, try the fastest possible speed setting, then a slower one, and so on, until data loss falls below an acceptable margin - and that’s your connection speed going forward.
Except that later, some transient situation causes loss of packets, and in order to try to maintain service, the router drops the speed still further.
And it seems that a great many routers/modems never try to ramp it back up again, until they are power-cycled.
Yes, if it doesn’t have a reset button. Some don’t have a power button, in which case, remove the power cable for a few seconds (10 should do it), then reconnect. It may take several minutes for the cycle to complete.
Most routers have a hole that you can poke into with a straightened paper clip. Don’t do this unless you want to re-enter all your settings from scratch; this will reset the unit back to factory specs, losing stuff you might need. Removing the power cable briefly should be enough of a reset for normal situations.
So, this ‘10 seconds’ thing has always confused me.
I do it, but could never figure out why it is required/recommended. Unless there is non-volatile memory (in which case 10 seconds isn’t going to matter?), I would think any loss of power would cause the router to be reset.
Most electronic devices can survive a brief power outage due to the way the internal power supply is constructed. (Capacitors store electricity, just not for long compared with batteries.) So dropping the power for too short a time won’t result in a reset. Unless someone can show many scientific tests on many models to establish the time needed, plus a margin for error and a margin for equipment variability, 10 seconds seems long enough for consumer routers.
My slogan: When in doote, reboot. It almost always works and I do not question it. Computer, cable modem, router. Have a problem? Turn them all off for 10 seconds.
The idea is to let any capacitors drain the charge they’re holding. It probably won’t make a difference, but it might, and it only takes a few seconds, so the advice is generally to wait those few seconds.
What is supposed to happen when the power comes on is that the device goes into power-on reset, and that reinitialises everything. However there is a twilight zone where the memory might still hold some residual values, and a lazy power-on reset code for the system might not actually properly clear everything and re-initialise it - depending upon the unfortunately not quite accurate idea that the memory is always clear when it reboots. So you can get very nasty effects where some of the state from before the power cycle is still hanging about like a ghost. It is rare, and I haven’t seen it in a very ling time, but I have observed it. A couple of extra seconds is cheap insurance. (Given I religiously always wait the extra few seconds might be why it is so long since I have been bitten, or it genuinely might no longer actually matter, I don’t know.)
True; but the better routers have a save configuration facility, enabling one to take snapshots and use them as backups when starting with a blank slate. Here’s where my dear old Billion ( now in abeyance ) does it: Port Forward.
Exactly like saving profiles of your BIOS settings.
If you go into your router configuration, there is often a way to schedule an automatic reboot. I have a finicky one that I just ended up setting to automatically reboot at 3am every morning.
It varies a bit depending on the router. Here are some general steps. Anyone who still has a default login / password on their router should really change it for security.
or 10.0.0.1 etc. Here’s a list of common addresses.
Here’s how to find the IP address on a Linksys router, on poor old Windows.
https://www.linksys.com/us/support-article?articleNum=132891
The default name and password is usually Admin / admin Check the router labels of the info for your model.
Once in there are many possibilities that generally should be left alone. There’s a menu on the side.