ROUTER MAINTENANCE YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU NEEDED
Did you know that the internet router from your cable company needs monthly maintenance? I didn’t know either until I found myself without WiFi signal for nearly a week. The maintenance process is easy and only takes a few minutes. Read on and I will fill you in on how to do it.
SO MUCH DRAMA
Internet outages are never a good thing. They are especially worse on work-from-home days. I found myself without a WiFi signal a couple of weeks ago when I was working from home.
Our office building was temporarily closed due to a water main break in town. There was no water for the toilets, coffee, or the emergency fire sprinklers for two days. Because our building was closed, I got to cut out my compute and take conference calls in yoga pants. It was amazing for about 10 minutes. And then, as though someone flipped a switch, my internet signal was gone. A few minutes later we were on the phone with the cable company, unplugging and plugging things back in. The end result was that the WiFi was gone. Were were going to have to wait for a technician. Ugggg!
Desperate to get things done, I had to plug an old fashioned Ethernet cable into my laptop. Doing so meant sitting near my internet router. The cable I had on hand was about 3 feet long. I had to move the guest bed just to have something other than the floor to sit on.
Hanging out in my messy guest room caused my ADD to start acting up. It became incredibly difficult to focus on spreadsheets, data validation, and other things I handle at work while there were dust bunnies in my sight line. The basket of ironing made my feet twitch. It was a serious nightmare and I couldn’t escape.
ROUTER MAINTENANCE
A cable technician visited us a few days later. He let us know that we were having issues with our WiFi because there were system updates that weren’t updating properly. The code for the updates was failing. As the updates began to pile up, the router began to fail. The router got so far behind on system updates that it now had to be replaced. He gave us a new router and we were all set.
How could I have prevented this situation? Simple! Our cable technician let us know that we need to perform simple maintenance on our router every month:
- We need to unplug the router.
- Next, we need to let it sit for about 30 seconds in order for it to reset itself.
- And then we should plug it back in.
This easy three step process will help keep system updates from failing in the future as well as keep our Wifi signal running strong. I hope it helps you, too!
