Some Quesions Regarding Network Equipment

[vagabond48]

These are for the technical gurus on this forum.

I sometimes need to tun off and turn on the dsl modem at my apartment building. In the US, when I needed to, I used to turn it off for about 10 seconds. Here I have been told to keep it off from 5 to as much as 10 minutes. It seems more than a few seconds is rather long.

My landlord recently upgraded his line from 520k to 2 meg remaining with TOT. Although at times, speed is good (not great) but often enough the speed is pretty slow bordering on comatose like state even at 3am. One of my neighbors decided to get his own 2 meg line but from TTT. He says generally his speed is great except when it slows some when school kids come home and access the internet. He is suggesting the 3 to 4 year old wifi routers (?) mounted on each outside wall floor which are somewhat subject the weather and the modem are old and probably should be replaced.

I would appreciate any expert opinions.

[h90]

These are for the technical gurus on this forum.

I sometimes need to tun off and turn on the dsl modem at my apartment building. In the US, when I needed to, I used to turn it off for about 10 seconds. Here I have been told to keep it off from 5 to as much as 10 minutes. It seems more than a few seconds is rather long.

My landlord recently upgraded his line from 520k to 2 meg remaining with TOT. Although at times, speed is good (not great) but often enough the speed is pretty slow bordering on comatose like state even at 3am. One of my neighbors decided to get his own 2 meg line but from TTT. He says generally his speed is great except when it slows some when school kids come home and access the internet. He is suggesting the 3 to 4 year old wifi routers (?) mounted on each outside wall floor which are somewhat subject the weather and the modem are old and probably should be replaced.

I would appreciate any expert opinions.

Normaly 10 seconds are OK. Than 5-10 minutes is meant for capacitors discharge. I never saw this necessary in real life.

If they work and can handle the speed (what I think unless they are from the stoneage) they don't need to be replaced.

That speed problem is normal I would say. If I get good speed I open a bottle champagne....I am already satisfied if I get "pretty slow".

[Cuban]

He is suggesting the 3 to 4 year old wifi routers (?) mounted on each outside wall floor which are somewhat subject the weather and the modem are old and probably should be replaced.

Depends on the equipment and the enviroment, also if there is any servicing during that period since the system was comissioned. Electrical contacts can suffer due to enviroment, reseating (unplug and reconnect) a few times is generally enough to 'clean' such connections - however a fresh dry toothbrush can help. The same is true for the aerial connection.

Routers wireless or otherwise, as h90 implies, either work or not. There are cases where a fault may affect through-put but generally a reboot cures the most common issue, poor memory management. What is the make/model? Is there a history (search support forums on this router) of bugs requiring OS upgrades or patching? Has security access been left open (how common is this!!) and someone is 'playing' with them remotely?

Normaly 10 seconds are OK. Than 5-10 minutes is meant for capacitors discharge. I never saw this necessary in real life.

For practical purposes in real life a short reboot is enough to completely reset equipment in relation to such a data connection, count to ten is what most 'professionals' do. I would imagine that the 5-10 minutes stems from the likely process at the exchange end of the ADSL data connection, that time is plenty for the exchange multipexer to see that ADSL line is down and reset it's hander for 'your' connection and, possibly for the IP address that your ISP had assigned for your ADSL router to have aged and been reused meaning you get a 'fresh' IP address this time round: assuming your are not on a static IP. Generally this sort of stuff is not an issue, but I can imagine the second line ISP internal support team telling their field service people to do that when fault finding other customer issues in the past so it becomes part of the field service team's technical folk-lore, it also keeps the field guys busy for ten minutes and off the back of the higher grade techies back at base.

Fault finding shared connections can be a pain unless you can control what is happening when you are testing. Can you see if the issue is related to your wifi speed or the ADSL connection speed? (Plug another PC into the wireless router and measure point to point speed, look at signal strength. For the main ADSL connection, how many people share it's use? Many online and active at the same time? Any PCs badly virus infected and spending all their time being naughty zombie devices?

Further reading: ADSL Primer.

HTH

Edited October 30, 2008 by Cuban