Wifi Woes

For the last few weeks we've had all sorts of problems with our internet connection. At first we just put it down to 2 of us working from home plus 2 kids home schooling whilst various combinations of us are listening to music streams or watching video streams. Then it just kept getting worse and more sporadic. In an effort to help my daughter out a new wifi extender was purchased (the old one was rather basic and rather slow so could do with being replaced anyway). Still it was problematic. Then occasionally there will be a shout of “please stop steaming, I'm on a Zoom” but it will turn out no one is streaming so we were unsure what would be causing it. Mrs Luke called Virgin, as the account is in her name, and they claimed it was due to the number devices connected at once. Thing is we've had this number of devices connected for at least 6 months and it was fine up until last month.

Then whilst I was trying to work but failing due to DNS not resolving for my desktop machine I hotspotted on my phone for a while. When I turned the hotspot off it autojoined the wifi extender network and was working fine. Then when I changed it back to the main network it stopped resolving DNS again. Hang on that's not right as the extender just gets access through the main network! Some more poking about and trying different devices and I found several tablets and computers had exactly the same problem. If they joined the main network no DNS would resolve but if they joined the extender network it worked fine. What's that all about??

So I spent some time looking at Virgin forums and looking in router logs to try and work out how to fix it. Checking various configs to check all was OK etc etc. Seems various people had had similar problems to us starting about a similar time and it could only be fixed by Virgin. Poor old Mrs Luke called them again and explained fully what was going on. In the end she was on the phone to them for about an hour but they did a remote wipe & reinstall on the router and presto! All the devices that couldn't resolve DNS before now can. Having it working properly is such a relief. It is one of those background stresses you don't realise is there until it has gone.

As an aside one thing that struck me while searching for the solution to this problem is the number of people that can't differentiate between their wifi connection and their internet connection. I do feel sorry for those Virgin call centre folks.

I am taking in the 100 Days to Offload blogging challenge set by Kev Quirk. Whilst lockdown is on do 100 blog posts to help you offload and to read what everyone else is up to.