Broadband Hub - Best Practice?

[jethro15]

Trying to get a definitive answer as to what is the best practice - and why?. Leave switched on, or turn off when not in use?

[green granite]

I turn my entire system off each night, I very rarely have any serious problems with any of my kit. It means that the functions are refreshed each day so that any minor corruptions in memory are removed. It also means that you change your ip address every day (assuming you have a dynamic address.) which can be a security enhancement. Despite what some people on here will say, it makes no difference to the speed, it's a reasonably solid 7Mbs or so even immediately after switching on.

the next poster will probably say exactly the opposite. :)

[BOAC]

Sorry to disappoint you, gg, but I agree. I use EOM to connect to the router and turn off the whole thing every night with no problems (as long as I remember to turn it on again in the morning...............)

Router needs about 20 secs to 'boot up' (if that is what routers do....)

[green granite]

Oh well, wrong again. :)

My entire system is plunged into a multiway extension block, so at night it's a case of start>shutdown then when it has turn of the wall socket and everything is off, next morning all I have to do is to switch on the wall socket switch.

My BT hub takes about twice as long as Windows 7 to fire up. I will time it tomorrow just to see, mind you I think a lot of the time is spent initializing the VOIP side of things.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Leave it on.

1) There is an automated process (which sometimes fails) that measures the speed capabilities of your line based on tweaking the speed upwards until the line drops and then backing off a bit. This can take up to 10 days to achieve a setting whereby the line is at it's fastest stable speed. You turning off the router at night can affect the results. (granted this is usually only done for the first 10 days of a new line, but sometimes the BRAS profile is amended mid-life).

2) Your wifi will be broadcasting on a defined channel (with overlaps) which is either manually set or automatically seeks to find the least congested airwaves. Since there are only 4 non-blocking channels that could be used, if you 'give up' your channel allocation at night, the chances are that another auto-roaming wifi access point in the vicinity will roam onto your preciously hoarded bandwidth, leaving your access point to either share with that when it turns back on (as auto roaming doesn't always happen without the AP having been rebooted) or you'll find your AP roams itself onto another channel which might not be compatible with your wifi card in your lappie (it does happen).

3) Having been out to install a router for a client an hour's drive away on Monday, only to be rung up just after i'd arrived home with them saying "there was a loud popping noise and i've got no internet again", there's something to be said for the resilience of components and power supplies when subjected to the on/off surges and heatcycles.

So, bottom line, leave it on....but I can understand why you wouldn't be affected if you turned it off.

[mixture]

I'll go with what the wise bloke from Bracknell said ! :cool:

[green granite]

So, bottom line, leave it on

So presumably, since they're the same type of power supply, you leave your mobile phone and other chargers on all the time as well?

[mixture]

So presumably, since they're the same type of power supply, you leave your mobile phone and other chargers on all the time as well?


My current phones are powered either by USB cables or PoE, so I guess yes, I do leave them plugged in. :cool:

Even if not the either of the above, due to circuitry inside, most modern chargers draw no or negligible power when not charging a device, so yes I do leave most things on all the time.

Also in my defence, anything that gets left plugged in and turned on is stuff that has a 99.9% chance of getting used daily. Anything else tends to get unplugged after use in order to reduce cable spaghetti.

[Ancient Observer]

I've got a BT BB hub, and I leave it on all the time for the simple reason that if SWMBO wakes up in the night and wants to use her ipad, then she can, and I sleep on in blissful ignorance.
If I had to, I would train her in how to turn on things computery, but I don't have to, so I don't.

The rest of the leccy stuff gets turned off as we've got one of those digital leccy usage monitor thingies.

[BOAC]

1) There is an automated process (which sometimes fails) that measures the speed capabilities of your line based on tweaking the speed upwards until the line drops and then backing off a bit. This can take up to 10 days to achieve a setting whereby the line is at it's fastest stable speed. You turning off the router at night can affect the results. (granted this is usually only done for the first 10 days of a new line, but sometimes the BRAS profile is amended mid-life). - that is what I thought too until last week when I whinged at my (LLU) ISP who grudgingly selected 'MAX' on my line. "Do I expect the BRAs profiling to drop that over the next few days", quoth I: " No", he said, "LLU does not use that technology. The speed may change if the SNR worsens, but should stay at xxx" and it has. Mind you, pinch of salt there as ISP man was 'from foreign parts'.:)

Then, of course we have HSB via whatever, which is a whole new ball-game and again I think not rate adaptive?

[mixture]

"LLU does not use that technology.

LLUs can, of course, use whatever technology they like. But given that one of their USPs over BT is constancy of good performance, on the whole they tend not to do as much fancy automatic knob tweaking but prefer to deal with edge cases as they arrive.

Then, of course we have HSB via whatever, which is a whole new ball-game and again I think not rate adaptive?

If by HSB I assume you mean FTTH (fibre to the home) ?

Oh, don't you worry BOAC..... the old tricks of contention, packet shaping and rate limiting will be there. Except they will be increasingly more coarsely applied downstream rather than granularly at the subscriber level.

[BOAC]

FTTH (fibre to the home) - and the black art of BT FTTC..............


Me! Worry?

[Milo Minderbinder]

Leave the router on all the time (unless you are away for extended periods)
Turning it on / off on a daily basis will cause the line monitoring software to assume there is a fault, and will reduce the signal speed in an attempt to compensate.

[handsfree]

I'm in the leave the router on camp.

From what I remember of my system integration and proving days, the ADSL subs line units can be a little tetchy if the far end comes and goes.
Things probably have improved since then of course but why put your router through heat cycling when they use so little power anyway.

[green granite]

Turning it on / off on a daily basis will cause the line monitoring software to assume there is a fault, and will reduce the signal speed in an attempt to compensate.

Sorry but that's a myth, From my earlier post.

I turn my entire system off each night, I very rarely have any serious problems with any of my kit. It means that the functions are refreshed each day so that any minor corruptions in memory are removed. It also means that you change your ip address every day (assuming you have a dynamic address.) which can be a security enhancement. Despite what some people on here will say, it makes no difference to the speed, it's a reasonably solid 7Mbs or so even immediately after switching on.

[Guest 112233]

Is it not established practice to keep the HH on. I agree with GG that you do get allocated a new IP address by your provider, but power cycling the router may reduce the life of the electronics.

We are talking about consumer electronics here. If you are using kit designed for industrial use this may not be a problem.

I'm a HH Mk1 user and I've reset the thing only a few times in the five years I used it (Wednesday the other week being one).
)
(GG: I'm within a mile of the Exchange and can get 10Mb download rates, if its left alone.


CAT III

[Milo Minderbinder]

In answer to GG
My job (among other computer hassles) partly involves resolving problems on these on a daily basis. For several years I also went out to customers sites on behalf of BT on contract, both installing and diagnosing broadband installations and faults.
I can assure you that the training manuals of BT, TalkTalk and several other BB suppliers all emphasise the need to keep the router constantly turned on, and from personal experience (on a large number of installations) I can say that it DOES make a difference
GG may be lucky in his location and have a good connection to his exchange. Most are not so lucky and need every scrap of extra speed that can be wormed out of BT's creaking local wires
As for the other points
"refresh the IP address" - why bother? Keeping a constant IP address helps remote access when you want to dial in to your network.. OK, you can use DynDNS, but even then the more constant the address the better
"minor corruptions in memory are removed". Huh?? Joke of the day surely? Routers are embdedded systems running Linux or a BSD variant. You don't get windows type memory issues. Never known it to be an issue. Typically I find routers will run for months without needing to be restarted. What occasionally happens is they will "hang" after someone / something tries a port scan attack or similar. Then they'll lock up and need restarting, but that can be very very rare. No need to forgo the benefits of leaving them on continuously just for that odd chance

[Mr Optimistic]

i switch off the computers but never the router. it is a 'why bother' action. we get enough power interrupts anyway.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Mr Optimistic
thats reasonable
One point though, if you have an inkjet printer, leave that ON, though on standby
As long as the standby current is there, the print heads stay pressurised. If you turn the mains power off, the heads lose pressure and need to recycle when next turned on - which uses up 2-3% of the available ink, which simply ends up in the waste pads.
2% a day soon adds up to a full ink cartridge!

[jethro15]

Thanks for all the input. I'll be leaving mine on from now on