“The internet keeps dropping out” covers three completely different faults with three
different fixes. Ten minutes of testing will tell you which one you have, and save you a
support call that ends in “have you tried restarting the router”.

First: is it the connection or the wifi?

This is the question that matters, and it’s easy to answer. Plug a laptop directly into the
router with a network cable and use it for a while.

• Wired is stable, wifi drops — your NBN connection is fine. It’s a wifi
  problem, and everything below applies.
• Wired drops too — it’s the connection or the router itself, and no amount
  of wifi tweaking will help.

If you can’t test wired, check whether the dropouts affect every device at once or just
one. Everything at once points at the router or the connection; one device points at that
device.

If it’s the wifi

Move the router before buying anything

Routers get installed wherever the socket is, which is often a corner of the house behind a
television. Wifi radiates outward, so a router at the end of the house covers the neighbours
better than your back bedroom. Central and high, out in the open, beats almost any upgrade you
can buy.

Understand the two bands

Your router broadcasts on 2.4GHz and 5GHz. The 5GHz band is much faster but travels less far
and handles walls poorly. The 2.4GHz band is slower but reaches further. Devices sometimes
cling to a weak 5GHz signal instead of switching, which feels exactly like a dropout. If your
router lets you separate the two into different network names, doing so gives you control over
which one a device uses.

Look for interference

The 2.4GHz band is shared with microwaves, cordless phones, baby monitors and every
neighbouring router. In a Canberra apartment building or a dense inner-north street, channel
congestion is a genuine cause. Most routers can pick a clearer channel automatically if you
tell them to rescan.

Mesh, not a repeater

If you have real dead zones, a mesh system is worth it. A cheap repeater rebroadcasts a
signal that is already weak, and typically halves your speed for the privilege.

If it’s the connection

Check whether your provider has a reported outage before anything else. Then look at what
technology you’re on — much of Canberra is on fibre to the premises, while other areas run
fibre to the node with copper for the last stretch. On a node connection, dropouts that get
worse in wet weather are a classic sign of water in the copper, and that’s a fault for your
provider to escalate rather than something you can fix.

Keep a simple log before you call: date, time, how long the dropout lasted, and whether
wired was affected. Providers escalate documented patterns far faster than “it keeps dropping
out”.

The one people forget

Routers supplied years ago with an old plan are frequently the cause. If yours has been in
service five or more years and is handling a house full of devices it was never designed for,
replacing it fixes more problems than any amount of configuration.

If you’d rather have someone test it properly and tell you which of the three it is, we do
that around Canberra — 02 6188 9898.