Router Finally Failed - new one fixed speed issues

[Pgoodwin1]

Ever since late April, my speeds have been erratic and trending down. I used to have a solid 50-53 Mbps down, 5.8 Mbps Up on my 50/5 TWC plan. Over the past week or so, page loads would hang, and my TestMy speed tests were all over the place ranging from 20 Mbps to about 40, and each individual download test showed huge variations - sometimes over 100%, and it was erratic regardless of time of day.

 

This morning, I was disconnected from the internet. I looked at the Router (a 10+ yr old wired DI-604 D-Link), and the lights were all very dim; kinda like the Terminator's eyes when it died, just after being crushed.

 

I bough a new wired router for $25 - a TrendNet TW100-S4W1CA. Hooked it up, turned it on, and voila everything worked fine. So much better that my speed right now at noon today are registering a solid 59-60 Mbps.

 

 

So the message here I guess is that erratic and low speeds can be caused by an intermittent Router. Mine was on it's way out for over two months before it had a hard failure.

[Sean]

What's interesting is that every single D-Link router I dealt with including corporate VPN routers all have a similar way of failing with the first symptom being webpages starting to hang regardless of the website, including the router's own GUI pages.  This then progresses with general slow down of connections such as persistent buffering in YouTube even when no one else is using the connection.  The D-link dfl-700 at my workplace was notorious for blowing power supplies and like Murphy's law, one would blow during a holiday period and I was glad when it was finally replaced.  it died in the same way with erratic Internet throughput.