Router resetting
Yesterday our home internet connection broke. Our internet service provider (ISP) didn’t show any outages in our area on their website. Interestingly, they pushed their business app: “You can check your bill, usage, and outages in your area in our app. Download it now!” With no internet, the only way our family could access the app is on our smartphones. The assumption that we have smartphones, indicates they know their audience. Every interaction with the app instead of by call or email, reduces the time and money devoted to actual people answering questions. This lowers the company’s costs and required office space. The app installed on their customers’ phones, allows the company to track where their customers go, where they access wifi, and what they’re doing online when not on their home internet. I don’t want this app.
We’ve had the internet connection go down before; we’ve been through troubleshooting enough times to be able to reset without looking it up. Resetting the internet connection involves first, unplugging the router, a wavy black shape about eight inches tall and two inches wide, sitting on a flat base. By unplug, I mean disconnect the power cord, the one that supplies electricity to the router. The router has three other wires leading from it. One is a coax cable running to a connector on the wall. Two are ethernet cables leading to two desktop computers. The router also connects to several other devices wirelessly, using wifi.
The coax cable goes outside the house, over several feet, and back in to a larger box on the wall in the basement. The basement box connects to a box on the outside of the house, a waterproof, solidly covered connector to a wire that runs to the power pole behind the back fence. I say wire; it might be fiber optic.
If unplugging and plugging in the router doesn’t connect to the internet, but the router is working, the next step is to unplug power to the basement box. After it has sat for five minutes unplugged, we plug it back into the power outlet. It goes through its reset function, and the router upstairs resets itself. If that doesn’t connect to the internet, the next step is to contact the company. They want me to use their app, which has complete instructions for the process I just described. Last time we called, several months ago, the customer service person walked me through all the same steps, even though we had already done them. This time the customer service person accepted that I had already done them, and cut to the chase.
Within an hour we had internet again. What a relief! And also… odd. He upsold us, of course. I was skeptical, but accepted. It works. I’m not complaining.
