Bizarre router behaviour

Bit of a long one, was just wondering if anyone else had experienced this bizarre behaviour

So a few week into lockdown i was experience an issue where wifi would just die. Everything disconnected and nothing would reconnect to wifi with an "authentication error". Wired worked fine, just wifi. A router reboot would fix it for a few more days. Couldnt for the life of me work out what the issue was, then i realised the wifi died not long after i made a Facetime call. Didnt happen everytime a call was made, but whenever it went down it was always during a call. Thought that was abit odd, but an easy fix was to stop using Facetime and use Whatspp video chat.

So a few week passed and no issues, i thought i had "fixed" it. Then i noticed one day while making a Whatsapp video call every other device attached to the router was very slow, and sometimes refusing to load webpages. Pings were 2000ms which was crazy. Soon as the call ended the returned to normal (28ms). This continued to happen for another few days before i had had enough.I dont have the fastest connection (8mbps) but it shouldnt be causing those issues. Weirdly the Whatsapp call stayed active despite all other devices seemingly having no bandwidth

I was using a very old Netgear DG834v5 router so assumed something in that wasnt working properly. I replaced it with a Netgear D6400 and so far the issue has been resolved

So yea, bizarre behaviour. Im the type of person who likes to know what causes issues, but i doubt i will ever know on this one

Edited by bobble_bob (Tue 09-Jun-20 15:04:02)

Sounds like the DG834 was getting too hot, it was a problem with them, I fitted a fan on mine.
google it and you will see others have done the same.

I only use my DG834 for WiFi access points, very useful with the removable Aerials to fit other better aerials for better coverage.

Edited by APTMAN (Tue 09-Jun-20 15:17:04)

I dont think it was heat, it was fine when hammering it using Netflix.

NAT table, FaceTime call may be dominating it, newer routers with more memory and CPU power can handle more things at once

Yea something along those lines i did suspect, although been using Facetime for years with no issues, so unless the table has got corrupt or something. Although weird how wired still worked even when wifi dropped

That Whatapp issue who knows though

Edited by bobble_bob (Tue 09-Jun-20 16:09:28)