Why doesn't Wi-Fi work if ethernet plugged in to router?

hans gruber

hans gruber

hans gruber

Associate
Joined
25 Feb 2016
Posts
219
Our internet was down for a few days recently. I have a wireless usb receiver that plugged in and used my phone hotspot for a few days.

What I noticed was that with the network cable still plugged into the router my PC had no internet. As soon as I removed the cable the internet worked.

This was a bit annoying as I have wireless printer.

Is there a way to have PC wired to router, but when the internet is not working it defaults to wireless connection? Or would I have to just wireless connect to router and get rid of the network cable for this to work?
 
Last edited:
Whenever a wired connection is detected Windows seems to default to this.

I wfh and have a laptop that will always use the wired connection over wireless, as soon as the cable is disconnected it defaults to the wireless card instead.

The only other thing I can think of is to disable the wired NIC as this will do the same job as taking out the cable. Just depends on which 1 is easier for you.

I guess it does not switch over to the wireless nic as the network connection to the router is still there but the internet is not
 
It's probably that your PC picks up a default route via both connections and prefers the wired one by default

I'm assuming you're using Windows here, with both wired and wireless connected, open a cmd prompt and type route print and look for routes with destination 0.0.0.0, if there is more than one look at the metrics, the lower will be preferred

An easy work around would be to set the wired connection with static IP details and leave out the default gateway address, that way things on the local LAN such as your printer would be reachable but it wouldn't try and use it to reach the Internet (just remember to change it back to dynamic allocation afterwards)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom