Does anyone know what Verizon could possibly have told my mother that would inspire the absolute conviction that the...
Does anyone know what Verizon could possibly have told my mother that would inspire the absolute conviction that the router must be turned off every day? Since no physical connection points were installed, it is the only way to get internet access in the house, and she inevitably turns it off when I'm in the middle of something. I'm just not familiar with the idea of having to turn it off all the time.
Power saving? Not much to say about that except the power used is pretty minimal.
ReplyDeleteWe always advise our DSL customers that while you can turn off the modem/router, it can fuck up the connection (because the system thinks it's re-syncing spontaneously) and definitely interferes with our ability to diagnose and correct any problems. Although if it's just a router behind a separate modem that wouldn't be the case.
That being said, these things are computers under the hood, so rebooting them occasionally can help alleviate problems, or even make sure they don't appear (if, say, they're the kind that shows up after n days of power on time). But that's a different thing to powering them off entirely — and if your router really is that crappy I'd advise getting a better one first (it's generally no longer necessary these days), and one of those automatic timer clocks second, so that it switches off and back on at say 5:00 and 5:01 am or something like that.
It seems to be a good quality router. Don't know if it matters, but it's FiOS. And the must turn off includes leaving it off for some unspecified period of time (definitely longer than a minute). It's just that I feel like I'm somehow being stupid by thinking it doesn't make any sense to turn it off. Maybe she overinterpreted something they said to her?
ReplyDeleteThe FiOS router Verizon gives their customers is merely okay, but it can run continuously without being powered down unless there is a problem. Unless your mom has FiOS TV services as well, the ONT can be set to use Ethernet instead of coaxial cable and you can use any router you want. Either way, unless you're actively having a problem, there is no good reason to randomly power down the router.
ReplyDeleteYour mom is an end user, and a home user to boot. The technician she spoke to was, thus, first-level.
ReplyDeleteThere are excellent first-level technicians. None of them want to keep being first-level technicians because first-level, being the primary contact for non-technical users, sucks. This means that good first-level techs cycle out as fast as they can, either promoted above phone-firewall or taking a different job. Bad first-level techs don't get promoted, and stay first level techs, but it takes a LOT to get a warm body who speaks the language and is willing to answer the phone fired.
This means, statistically, the first-level tech you're speaking to at any given time is probably inexperienced, incompetent, or both. If you get a good tech, thank them, appreciate them, and miss them because they're not going to be there for long.
This is a long way of saying "never, ever take anything any first-level tech says as gospel", with an eye towards "oh hell no there's no reason to reboot your modem/router daily unless you're having a problem daily, and if you're having a problem daily that's something Verizon needs to fix. Either your mom misunderstood or the tech was an idiot, and the tech being unclear or an idiot is really, really common."
"Power it off, leave it off for a minute, power it on again" is the hard-reset troubleshooting step. It's what you do when the internet is already down, to make a clean connection from scratch. It's the modem equivalent of "okay, reboot your computer and try again. Does the error still appear?". It's a perfectly good step. It's just not one you do BEFORE there's a problem.
Thank you. I feel less stupid now.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I feel less stupid now.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the Tl;dr on all of that is"it's definitely not you".
ReplyDeleteThey probably told her to reset the router to try and fix something, and probably said something to the effect of "Sometimes you have to turn the router off and back on for it to work right". It's not too far of a stretch to "It has to be turned off every day."
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