Donate to Remove ads

Got a credit card? use our Credit Card & Finance Calculators

Thanks to Bhoddhisatva,scotia,Anonymous,Cornytiv34,Anonymous, for Donating to support the site

Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

Seek assistance with all types of tech. - computer, phone, TV, heating controls etc.
MyNameIsUrl
Lemon Slice
Posts: 474
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 1:56 pm
Has thanked: 1298 times
Been thanked: 107 times

Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473174

Postby MyNameIsUrl » January 14th, 2022, 7:58 pm

For a long time my connection has frequently dropped, up to several time a day, sometimes recovering by itself and sometimes seemingly aided by switching the router on and off.

It’s unclear to me just where the problem lies. My tablet sometimes shows ‘no connection available’, sometimes ‘connected, no internet’. The router only very very occasionally shows a red light indicating no incoming internet, so I’m inclined to think the problem is the old Netgear router. It’s 10+ years old.

Can someone please recommend a replacement – I’d prefer to spend a bit more to have something with a good range rather than skimp. No gaming required, a single viewer of Netflix is probably the highest demand it will face.

Or could the problem be elsewhere – does the choice of ISP affect reliability, or could the overhead phone wire have problems? Difficult to know how to diagnose the unreliability, so I’m thinking that replacing the ancient router would be a good first step.

Midsmartin
Lemon Slice
Posts: 777
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 7:18 am
Has thanked: 211 times
Been thanked: 491 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473191

Postby Midsmartin » January 14th, 2022, 9:18 pm

It may or may not be the router. Many of the big name ISPs will now send you a new one for free if you call them with a fault. Some may sneakily sign you up for a new contract though.

Call your ISP anyway. There may be a line fault, and they may be able to detect that if you ask them to check.

Are you on an old ADSL line, or fibre? Do you have filters fitted on all phone extensions, or a wall faceplate with a filter? Is the router connected to an internal extension, or the master phone socket where the signal comes into the house?

mc2fool
Lemon Half
Posts: 7774
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:24 am
Has thanked: 7 times
Been thanked: 2997 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473195

Postby mc2fool » January 14th, 2022, 10:03 pm

Is your tablet your only device? If not, do other devices suffer similar problems at the same time? Even a smart phone? Do you have a device that has or you can make a wired connection to the router with? If so, have you tried that at the same time you're having problems on the tablet?

In addition to Midsmartin's questions, who is your ISP? Some (many/most/all?) have online line testers, so you don't have to wait for yonks listening to muzak in order to get them to check the line. If you say who your ISP is then other users can advise on that, and also on their experiences of getting a new router out of them.

monabri
Lemon Half
Posts: 8370
Joined: January 7th, 2017, 9:56 am
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 3412 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473207

Postby monabri » January 15th, 2022, 12:01 am

I had similar problems where my connection to the ISP would be dropped temporarily when we had heavy rain. The telephone line (the actual cable) was replaced and the issue was resolved. This took three visits to sort out.

MrFoolish
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2270
Joined: March 22nd, 2020, 7:27 pm
Has thanked: 548 times
Been thanked: 1098 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473222

Postby MrFoolish » January 15th, 2022, 7:55 am

I do wish all the companies involved in providing broadband services would get to together to find a unified way of providing their customers with better diagnostics of connection problems.

Different coloured LEDs just don't cut it (though of course it is cheap). If you got a more meaningful error message on a little display then at least you can google it.

I've also had the (Indian) call centre sending me on a wild goose chase of turning my router repeatedly off and on - then I find out later that the entire area had been without service for hours! They really need to get their acts together.

monabri
Lemon Half
Posts: 8370
Joined: January 7th, 2017, 9:56 am
Has thanked: 1535 times
Been thanked: 3412 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473247

Postby monabri » January 15th, 2022, 10:23 am

The other issue I've seen which gave rise to an intermittent connection was down to a poor connection of wires at a junction box. The telephone line enters our house and is routed through an airing cupboard. The telephone line then terminates at a small (30mm x30mmx20mm ) plastic connector box. Cables from the master socket connect to this box. The engineer has twice diagonosed problems here, once where he replaced the box entirely and once where the connections were loose.

if you phone your ISP they can run tests at their end and suggest what the problems might be. The issue is that they might say "if you want an engineer to investigate and it is found to be down to something you have done wrong or a fault in your equipment, then you will be billed for a call out".

ReformedCharacter
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 3120
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:12 am
Has thanked: 3573 times
Been thanked: 1509 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473273

Postby ReformedCharacter » January 15th, 2022, 12:07 pm

monabri wrote:The other issue I've seen which gave rise to an intermittent connection was down to a poor connection of wires at a junction box.

I had a very similar problem some years ago. BT attended twice but didn't find the cause. In our case the 'connection box' was mounted on the front door frame. I noticed that the disconnects seemed to happen at certain times of the day and wanted to quantify them - and be able to demonstrate the disconnections to my ISP. I wrote a script that would periodically ping a website, the BBC IIRC, and log the results. Sure enough the disconnects would start sometime around 3.30pm and end later in the evening. The third time a BT engineer attended he looked more closely at the wires that entered the connection box and the ends looked a little charred as if the line had perhaps been struck by lightning at some point. Anyway, what had been happening is that my children returned home from school and then went in and out of the house to the park nearby, each time rattling the door sufficiently in the door frame to cause a temporary disconnection of the damaged wires. I was very pleased to have that diagnosed and fixed :)

RC

AleisterCrowley
Lemon Half
Posts: 6381
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:35 am
Has thanked: 1880 times
Been thanked: 2026 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473278

Postby AleisterCrowley » January 15th, 2022, 12:20 pm

Assuming you are using ADSL of course..

My old flat was a fair distance from the exchange and I used to lose internet connections regularly. The Openreach guy said it was likely that varying noise levels on the line were a problem and fitted a filtered Openreach connection box/NTE (including the ADSL microfilter, so a phone and router socket)
This certainly seemed to improve matters.
Now I live 400ft from the local excange in a 2015 built flat and get 20Mbps download :-)

mc2fool
Lemon Half
Posts: 7774
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:24 am
Has thanked: 7 times
Been thanked: 2997 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473292

Postby mc2fool » January 15th, 2022, 1:34 pm

ReformedCharacter wrote:I wrote a script that would periodically ping a website, the BBC IIRC, and log the results.

There is a non-techie (no script writing involved) "inverse" way of doing the same, although it does require a little setting up and may still look a bit techie to a non-techie. ;)

I use the ThinkBroadband Broadband Quality Monitor which pings my router every second and produces a latency and packet loss graph like so:

Image
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality

You can bookmark your page or the graph, or, if like me you have a local homepage, embed it into that. It keeps the data and graphs for the last couple of months.

Of course, my router may change IP address on a resync so I set it up with a dynamic DNS, which I got (free) from https://www.dynu.com/ and I use their IP update client software, which just runs in the background on both my desktop and laptop and updates the dynamic DNS if it changes.

Obviously (like a local script) if the IP update client isn't running, 'cos e.g. the PC has been switched off or put to sleep overnight, then you don't get a fully accurate picture if the line has resynced during that period, but what you will then see is a solid red block and you can go look at the router logs to see if it was just a single resync or a number of them.

Gerry557
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1962
Joined: September 2nd, 2019, 10:23 am
Has thanked: 171 times
Been thanked: 525 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473298

Postby Gerry557 » January 15th, 2022, 1:52 pm

You can get a bt mesh system for less than £100 and turn off the router WiFi.

MyNameIsUrl
Lemon Slice
Posts: 474
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 1:56 pm
Has thanked: 1298 times
Been thanked: 107 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473555

Postby MyNameIsUrl » January 16th, 2022, 4:53 pm

Thanks for the responses – I’ve now worked through them:

I’m on an ADSL line with Entanet. The router is plugged into a small box on a 4-inch cable which is in turn plugged into the master socket, with outlet sockets for modem and phone.

I called Entanet who ran a test, with no faults found. My problems have always been been intermittent and unpredictable, so that’s inconclusive. They have increased the SNR margin from 6 to 9.9 which should help if I have an interference problem (though I don’t know how to check for that).

Generally all my devices fail to connect at the same time, so I don’t think a device is a fault. Very occasionally in the past only a wired desktop has connected, but wifi has returned with a reboot of the router or by waiting a while.

Sometimes the loss of connection seem to be linked to powering up an old laptop but again it has returned with a reboot of the router or by waiting a while.

The phone line is overhead from a pole, with a junction box on the house wall under the eaves. I suppose there could be a problem with moisture/corrosion in there – would the ISP test now have ruled that out?

I’ve had no problems at all in the 48 hours or so since my post, but the graph on ‘ThinkBroadband Broadband Quality Monitor’ is a solid red block, so I’ll have to investigate that further.

My router was a freebie about 15 years ago so an up upgrade is probably in order anyway – should I just pick something from Currys at £100 or so and that will be ok?

mc2fool
Lemon Half
Posts: 7774
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:24 am
Has thanked: 7 times
Been thanked: 2997 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473579

Postby mc2fool » January 16th, 2022, 5:50 pm

MyNameIsUrl wrote:I’m on an ADSL line with Entanet.

Who? I've never heard of Entanet and on a cursory google it seems they are owned by CityFibre and are a wholesale ISP. I couldn't find any retail offering from them, so I'm a little confused as to how they're your ISP. :?

The router is plugged into a small box on a 4-inch cable which is in turn plugged into the master socket, with outlet sockets for modem and phone.

Uh? So you have a master socket like this or similar, with the two sockets, but what is this small box on a 4-inch cable? It sounds like a microfilter but then you can't plug that into the modem socket of the master socket, so again, I'm confused. :?

Generally all my devices fail to connect at the same time, so I don’t think a device is a fault. Very occasionally in the past only a wired desktop has connected, but wifi has returned with a reboot of the router or by waiting a while.

Well that's worth exploring the next time(s) it happens, as if wired worked but wifi doesn't then that tells you the problem is with the wifi and not the ADSL line.

I’ve had no problems at all in the 48 hours or so since my post, but the graph on ‘ThinkBroadband Broadband Quality Monitor’ is a solid red block, so I’ll have to investigate that further.

Could be that your router is blocking ping requests. There's a lot of details about such on the ThinkBroadband site (although you have to dig a little for it). If you let us all know the exact model of your router then any Lemons with experience with it may be able to advise (without having to trudge through manuals. :D)

My router was a freebie about 15 years ago so an up upgrade is probably in order anyway – should I just pick something from Currys at £100 or so and that will be ok?

Does Entanet not provide routers (for free, as part of the package)?

AleisterCrowley
Lemon Half
Posts: 6381
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:35 am
Has thanked: 1880 times
Been thanked: 2026 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473596

Postby AleisterCrowley » January 16th, 2022, 6:17 pm

Has the master socket got a separate modem and phone socket like this?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/bt-master-sock ... ket+5c+mk4
Is so you don't need the dangly microfilter (small box with a lead to plug into master socker and two sockets on t'other end)

scotview
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 1474
Joined: November 5th, 2016, 9:00 am
Has thanked: 598 times
Been thanked: 911 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473605

Postby scotview » January 16th, 2022, 6:44 pm

My Lenovo laptop was dropping out in our upstairs study which is fairly remote from our hub. We got a BT Mini Whole Home, 4 disk system from Amazon.

The laptop hasn't dropped out since and our more remote broadband speeds have increased.

MyNameIsUrl
Lemon Slice
Posts: 474
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 1:56 pm
Has thanked: 1298 times
Been thanked: 107 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473628

Postby MyNameIsUrl » January 16th, 2022, 8:43 pm

I’ve been with Entanet over 10 years - according to wikipedia they were acquired by Cityfibre in 2017. I suppose they have some legacy retail customers.

The master socket has only one socket – the small box looks very like the microfilter linked to. Presumably this arrangement is functionally the same as a double socket?

The router is a Netgear 54Mbps Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router DG834G v5

AleisterCrowley
Lemon Half
Posts: 6381
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:35 am
Has thanked: 1880 times
Been thanked: 2026 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473631

Postby AleisterCrowley » January 16th, 2022, 9:07 pm

Yes, the double socket replaces the microfilter.
Microfilters can fail, and some aren't very good to begin with.... might be worth trying a new/different one?

mc2fool
Lemon Half
Posts: 7774
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 11:24 am
Has thanked: 7 times
Been thanked: 2997 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473635

Postby mc2fool » January 16th, 2022, 9:26 pm

MyNameIsUrl wrote:The master socket has only one socket – the small box looks very like the microfilter linked to. Presumably this arrangement is functionally the same as a double socket?

Yes, functionally the same but the microfilters are more prone to failure, including by being kicked, bumped into by vacuum cleaners, etc.

Usually the very first tick-box thing support centres ask you to do if you're having BB problems is to replace the microfilter. It's worth doing, if nothing else for elimination purposes. Do you have a spare one? Routers usually come with two. And most ISPs will send you another for free on asking...

jfgw
Lemon Quarter
Posts: 2533
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 3:36 pm
Has thanked: 1096 times
Been thanked: 1145 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473636

Postby jfgw » January 16th, 2022, 9:40 pm

If you have any extension sockets, remove the lower faceplate from the master socket. This disconnects everything and reveals a socket. Plug just the modem router (via the filter) into this and see if it makes a difference.

Julian F. G. W.

didds
Lemon Half
Posts: 5220
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 12:04 pm
Has thanked: 3226 times
Been thanked: 1012 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473986

Postby didds » January 18th, 2022, 8:41 am

MyNameIsUrl wrote:It’s unclear to me just where the problem lies. My tablet sometimes shows ‘no connection available’, sometimes ‘connected, no internet’.


The first means its not connected (via wifi) to the router at all.

The second means its connected to the router, but the router isnt connected to the internet.

Why either of those situations exists is a whole extra set of hypothesis and subsequent investigations :-(

didds
Lemon Half
Posts: 5220
Joined: November 4th, 2016, 12:04 pm
Has thanked: 3226 times
Been thanked: 1012 times

Re: Unreliable connection to wifi/internet

#473987

Postby didds » January 18th, 2022, 8:44 am

MyNameIsUrl wrote:My router was a freebie about 15 years ago so an up upgrade is probably in order anyway – should I just pick something from Currys at £100 or so and that will be ok?



Id suggest that is a definite first starting point (though generally speaking netgear stuff, even severe legacy stuff, is pretty robust in my expereince. thats not to say its a "one off" issue).

Would/does your ISP not provide routers with your package?


Return to “Technology - Computers, TV, Phones etc.”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Newroad and 5 guests