Help! Sudden wireless range drop

I've got Plusnet 76Mb fibre, with the BT openreach modem and the Technicolour router. I've written in the past about wifi problems but for the past few weeks it's been good and I've been getting 30-50Mb wireless speeds all over the house which is fine.

This afternoon some children came to the house and one of them pulled some of the wires and loosened them and the internet connection went down. I plugged everything back in and rebooted the router but there's now a big wifi problem.

I get 70+Mb speed with ethernet. If I put the laptop a few feet from the router I get 40-50MB wireless speeds. But there's almost nothing in the rest of the house. Walk a few feet away from the router and the wifi suddenly drops speed. Can get 1Mb in the front room but no wifi connection anywhere else. The front room used to get 60Mb with wireless until today.

I've tried different channels, to no effect. I suspect this is a hardware problem, i.e. the router got damaged when the child pulled the wires. Any ideas? Should I buy a new router?

Try a "factory reset" on it.

Thanks, Roberto! That seems to have helped. I thought that rebooting the router via the browser would be as good as turning it off and on. Turns out I was wrong. After reading your post I turned the router off via the power button and then on again after 2-3 minutes. Now the internet is back around the house. Phew. It's slower than this morning, before the little brats visited our house, but I'm hoping the speed will go back to normal by itself.

Ironically, I think doing the speed test at this site (which I've done about 50 times today) had made things worse because the connection was fragile. I suspect that the test floods the connection, the Technicolour router can't cope and drops the connection. I am going to avoid doing any more speed tests for a day or two, to let the connection get stable.

Ah, I'm glad that helped, but it wasn't what I meant . My fault, I was rushing.

A power-cycle which is what you just did often helps, but a factory reset literally sets the router back to its ex-factory, or usually these days ex-ISP setup, condition. Somewhere on your router will be a small hole labelled "Reset". Inside there is a spring-loaded micro-switch.

You don't turn the router off. Instead, you get something like an opened up paper-clip and press it gently but firmly into that hole. You should feel the switch go down if you start gently. After 5-10 seconds some of the lights will go out and some will start flashing. As soon as that happens you take the paper-clip away and just wait for the router to complete the task. It will end up rebooted.

In the case of Plusnet you may need to re-enter your broadband username and password, ([email protected] IIRC).

Many people, including me, have spent ages like you trying to get an intractable problem sorted out, only to find a factory reset fixes it in 30 seconds.

Thanks, the paperclip thing was what I was going to try next! But turning it off and on fixed the problem so I decided to leave well enough alone.

I know my broadband username is [email protected] as you say. Not sure what the password is. I just asked on the Plusnet website forum if it's the same as my password for the Plusnet website. Hopefully will get an answer.

I would ring through to plusnet, they now provide the BT HomeHub branded as a PlusNet hub which is far superior to the technicolour router. See if they can switch you over to the new hub.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/11/uk-isp-...

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 27-Mar-16 22:10:16)

Ring Plusnet? Not sure I can spare the time to hang on and wait for them to answer.

Anyway, Jess the robot at their site just answered my question: the router's broadband password is the same as the website password. Might yet try and see if Plusnet can upgrade me and what they'll charge.

So the new router is dual band 5Ghz.

Put it this way, on 2.4Ghz using my Homehub 5 I get a throughput of 20Mbps, that is likely because I live in London and I am surrounded by other 2.4Ghz wireless points. Also at times my 2.4ghz wireless drops down to below 1Mbps speed, likely because a neighbour has a poorly performing device such as a wireless tv transmitter or a Chinese baby monitor...

On 5Ghz on the HomeHub I can pass through speeds of 350Mbps (downloading from my NAS drive).

The limitations of 2.4Ghz are huge in my opinion. I doubt it's even the router causing slowdown just that the 2.4Ghz band is over utilised.

The things that slow the wireless down are not usually the neighbours routers, wifi routers work well together. It is the cheap wireless doorbells, home wireless telephones, microwaves, Bluetooth keyboards, Bluetooth earphones, Bluetooth mice, Bluetooth anything, baby monitors etc. These are devices you cannot see.

Often when you see 3 of the neighbours wifi routers are on channel 1, and you select channel 6 to avoid them, you are just putting yourself on a channel absolutely rammed with Bluetooth devices, doorbells, baby monitors etc... & your performance is way worse than the 3 neighbours wifi devices which are all sharing a channel.

5Ghz does help a lot although in a few years that'll likely be congested too.

Thanks, that's useful. I'll be sure that my next router is a dual band one.