Resolved Do routers have problems with more up to date OSes?

I live in Tornado Alley. A few years ago, we had a really bad storm come through. Over 200,000 homes lost power for days from downed trees and power lines.

I lost power for 4 days, but worse (not really but it seemed like it! ) a huge tree branch came down and took out my cable drop. No Internet or cable TV for 10 days!

However, once the cable guy finally came out, he replaced the entire drop from the junction box on the pole to my house. The old cable was split outside and then fed to different floors of the house. But he went a step further. He left me enough cable that I could pull the cable drop from the pole into my house, across and through the basement ceiling joists and up through the floor into the closet in my computer room. So I now have a direct (no splices or splitters) run from the pole to the splitter in my closet. That splitter then feeds my modem from one splitter output and all the TVs from the other output. No more exterior splitters vulnerable to the harsh weather extremes here in Nebraska. But that's not even the best of it!

Here's the big point. The old cable was high quality, exterior grade, but it was RG-59. It was replaced with high quality exterior grade RG-6. RG-6 is still 75Ω cable, but it supports much higher frequencies, has a much bigger conductor (for lower signal loss per 100 feet), and much better shielding - all of which provide much better/faster Internet support and superior high-resolution TV/video image quality.

I didn't even realize the old cable (which was at least 15 years old - it was there when I bought the house) was degrading both my Internet performance and my TV signals. But clearly it was. My Internet service instantly became rock solid stable and faster, and image quality on all the TVs improved dramatically too. I felt like a poorly sighted person getting his first pair of glasses - never realizing what I was missing before.

So make sure all your coaxial cables are RG-6 too.

 

Since I told my router to use channel 1, I have had 3 days of fairly solid internet (only one dropped connection for a minute, which was resolved when I rebooted the router from my laptop--before this, I'd have to power it down and then cold boot it). I will mark this as solved.

I do appreciate the information here--and the suggestion to call my ISP.

 

@ Tony - I assume there is a splitter in that box outside. Hopefully the box is weather proof.

But IMO, it is not resolved. You should not have any dropped connections. And you should never have to reboot your router (unless you make significant changes to your network configuration, or update the firmware) and almost never have to reboot your modem.

I wish, instead of rebooting your router, you waited a little to see if it came back. And while waiting, that you checked with other devices on your network to see if they lost connection too. If they still had connection, you should have tried rebooting the laptop before the router.