Router problems - is it on it's way out?

valve90210

valve90210

valve90210

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17 Jan 2006
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I have been using my Speedtouch 585 broadband modem/router for the last 4 years or so and had very few problems with it, however in the last couple of months it seems to have developed a problem.

Several times now the internet connection has stopped working, no pages will load, everything just times out of I get told I need to be connected to the internet.

The internet light on the router is illuminated green - which means the router is connected to the internet - and when I log into the web-interface and check the connectivity of the internet connection it says it is working fine - taking only moments to check - (I have had times when the problem has been at my ISP's end and it's taken much longer to check the connectivity) but still no pages will load etc.

If I switch the router off and back on again it does the usual restarting stuff and the lights gradually come on and go green, the dsl syncs up and it connects to the internet again and low and behold everything is working fine on the pc again, internet etc all nice and quick as they should be.

I also had a problem with the wifi connection and DCHP server whereby everytime I tried to connect my HTC Desire Z, it would get stuck at when obtaining an IP address from the router and wouldn't work. I got round this by setting a static IP on the phone, but even that sometimes fails to work properly.

Is it likely that my router is on it's last legs? It is getting on a bit and there are no firmware upgrades available for it.

If it is likely that the router is dying, are there any standout replacements anyone cna recommend...without me having to spend too much (the speedtouch was about £60)

Any help/thoughts much appreciated.

valve
 
It sounds like it could be duff firmware if you're getting DHCP issues. The pages not loading might not actually be the connection but DNS. It isn't unheard of that routers doing forwarding of DNS lookups (I.E where your DNS server settings on your PC reference the router's IP not the actual DNS servers) suffer firmware bugs and randomly stop doing it.
Have a look for firmware, even if you can't get a newer version than what you have, re-installing the same version may fix the issue. Or even rolling it back to an earlier version may resolve it if it is an issue with that firmware release.
 
Thing is it's been working fine for 4 years with the firmware I've got (which was the last one they did). I had to change to an updated one shortly after I got the router as it kept suffering idle timeout errors (iirc) due to my crappy phone line and I kept getting disconnected all the time which made it unusuable, the newer firmware sorted that out and made it much better, and as I say has been fine for the last 4 years.

Your comment about DNS, while not making a huge amount of sense to me (I'm not particularly technical with these things) sounds like a possibilty. When setting up static IP addresses on my xbox, etc I have had to input the default gateway and DNS and both are the same IP address, which is (I believe) that of the Router.

Maybe it would be worth me trying a reset to default settings or something to make sure there aren't any silly settings things messing things up along the way?
 
Well you could try putting your ISPs DNS server addresses into the Xbox manually, and put those addresses in the DHCP options to be distributed to DHCP enabled devices. This won't be detremental to anything and might solve the issue with pages not loading. However the DHCP over wireless issue wont' be fixed by that. But that could be a completely separate issue anyway, and on this size of network it's easily worked around as you've said in your opening post.

It is probably still worth re-installing the firmware, to do this you might have to install an older one then update it back to the one you had. It depends on the update mechanism and whether it overwrites the existing image regardless.
The fact it's worked ok for years doens't rule firmware out. Just like any other OS (because firmware invariably includes an OS image usually based on linux/unix/bsd), bits of it can become corrupted causing services to crash etc. In the same way a re-format fixes strange issues in windows, a firmware re-flash may iron out weird things on a router.
 
Regarding the DNS, I guess I'd leave the default gateway address as the router and just change the DNS ip address to the ISPs DNS address?

Yeah, good point, I'll see about re-installing the firmware and see if that helps, thanks for your advice.
 
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