Every once in a while a friend of mine will call me up and tell me something along the lines of “My internet doesn’t seem to be working, it worked fine last night.” It’s a tough call to mention to them something really technical so you got to try to keep it simple as possible.
This is what my little home setup looks like, from the top down is my Comcast Cable Modem, my Linksys Router, and my Comcast Telephony Modem. I need the two modems from Comcast due to the fact that the one on the top is DOCSIS 3.0 capable, and the one on the bottom is older and deoesnt have the speed o the new one.
One of the first reasons I can think of as to why your internet would seem to randomly stop working is because your modem has lost connection to the router, for various reasons. It could be because the router is older and has simply lost connection due to age, or maybe because there is no Keep alive feature enabled. There also might be some more underlying problems that are hard to troubleshoot, but let’s just say it lost it’s connection. Generally speaking.
The first thing you should do is restart your modem. It might be tough because sometimes your modem might have a battery backup or some way of staying on when the power is out. A lot of times there is a little hole in the back that may or may not be labeled Reset. It is normally quite simple to do, just find a nail or a pen or something like that and hold in the reset button for ten to fifteen seconds. All of the lights on the front of the modem will flash on and off for a minute or so, but that is totally normal so don’t worry!
Afterwords, check your email! If it is working, then you can stop right here. If you still don’t have your email (or any internet, for that matter) then you need to move on to your router.
Back of my setup, sorry about the blurriness!
This is the back of my setup, same thing as before. Sorry about the blurriness, I’m not a professional photographer thats for sure. If you are moving on to the router now, you want to pull out the black power adapter that will be on either the farthest left or the farthest right side of the router. Again lets go for the ten to fifteen second rule, just leave it out for a bit and let it cool its jets. Then just plug it back in and let it start up. It has to start up kind of like a computer does, but there is no power button it just turns itself on automatically.
After that, hopefully everything is working. It should be working just as normal and you should be reconnected to the internet like it normally is when it is in good working quality.
The last final thing to try, is just to make sure it isn’t in Standby mode. Lately some modem manufacturers have been installing something called Standby Mode which is, at least to me, 100% useless. I suppose it is made to save power, or maybe quickly cut you off from the internet if you did something bad and don’t want to be traced. But it seems that most of the time it is the darn Standby button that just makes people want to call me! Often it is something as silly as one of the kids accidentally pushed it, or they say it was an accident, who knows! Just push that button, give it a few seconds, and try your luck online. If it STILL doesn’t work, call your local computer guru to get this solved because it obviously isn’t anything hardware related, so you might have a virus or some spyware stopping you from getting in.
