Plausible for the switch in a home router to fail?

Soldato
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I have a Thomson TG585v7 which until recently worked tolerably well. Now I appear to have no wired connectivity at all, however wireless is behaving itself and the adsl connection seems to be alright.

By no wired activity, I mean that my ethernet TV cannot access a server on the same switch or the internet, I cannot access the server over ssh (or with ping), and I cannot send anything to a printer.

I think that's very strange, as I expected the router to die abruptly rather than one piece at a time. So, before I start the exciting process of persuading my ISP that it isn't my fault that the router has stopped working, is it at least plausible that the switch has failed independent from the rest of the device?
 
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Yep, moved cables around in case they had come loose and reset things to factory defaults. I've verified that the server can be accessed if connected directly to a desktop, but sadly I don't have much in the way of spare networking hardware available to test further.
 
It's definitely possible as I’ve had it happen on several occasions with Linksys routers.

I did once go to the trouble of RMAing one of them. Part of the test procedure was to connect a network cable between two of the network ports and see which LEDs came on. It was a few years ago, but I think lights out indicated a dead switch.
 
I had this happen with one of the black Sky Netgear routers (DG934G).

Reset and reflashed and made no difference.

As in your situation the wireless and the WAN side of things were fine.
 
Cheers for the replies guys, if other people have had this happen it improves the chances that I've diagnosed it correctly. I do have lights when connecting two ports together with a patch cable, and also have a light when there's something else on the other end of the cable.

I think I'm going to find a replacement one then rma this, as wireless-only is still better than no internet at all. Thanks again
 
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