We've been away for a couple of weeks so I have not had time to play with the router until this week. When we came back to here I brought a TP-Link wireless router with me. This is a 4 port plus WiFi unit that connects by ethernet cable. I plugged this into the award winning router and pushed all of our WiFi devices to connect to it rather than the award winning router our internet provider issued. This stayed working properly for 3 days.
Yesterday evening, as a test, I pushed my old laptop back onto the dodgy router and the WiFi worked for about an hour before locking out, as it has before. The other devices in the house carried on connecting to the TP-Link WiFi and data flowed properly. This morning the WiFi was still connecting to the dodgy router but still no data flowed.
Leaving it locked out, I called the techy help. They tried to interogate it from their end and they could see the TP-Link and Vonage phone ethernet connections but then they rebooted the router and cut off my phone call. I called back. Another customer techy chap then decided to separate the 2.4GHz and 5GHz logins and thought he had fixed our issues. Thanks for suggesting this DonC,. He hadn't. After 40 mins the WiFi stopped issuing data despite the connection to the computer showing 80% signal connected. I called again. They looked at it from their end again and asked me to unplug my TP-Link router. This caused my phone call to drop due to my mobile using Voip as the mobile network coverage is poor in the house. I put the knotted hanky on my head and put my left foot in the bucket of water (Mony P solution) to make the mobile work and called them again. This time the techy messed with the DNS settings in the router and we are currently back up running the WiFi on the provider's router, 40 mins and counting.
I don't understand what is going on, I think the DNS settings are set to some defaults when the router is sent out but apparently they don't work for everyone??? My understanding is that the DNS settings are a look up which ties apparent URLs seen by browsers to an actual hardware address on the internet and they are all stored on a server(s). Why some routers would need one DNS server and some use another I can't get my mind around. Even more confusing is why one server is good for up to an hour and then stops working and that they think another one will be any better. The techy also failed to answer why the selection of a particular DNS would stop WiFi data from flowing from the internet but allow the data to carry on flowing through the ethernet to any of our devices.
I spoke too soon, it has all ground to a halt again.
Plusnet have asked for their modem/router back.
Rans6...........