Why Do You Always Have to Reboot Wireless Routers?

Jon Shea December 30th, 2008

You know how some consumer routers and switches need to be rebooted reularly? Every week or so they crash, and all you’ve got to do is reboot them to bring them back. If you’re like me, then your parents have one of these routers.

Anyway, Jeff and I have spent a few evenings at the office hypothesizing about why these crashes happen. I figured it was just bad code, stack overflows or the like. Jeff thought it was probably an electronics issue. With cheap or poorly planned electronics it’s entirely possible that line noise could corrupt the system state.

Well, give Jeff a point. Michael Rothwell (author of my favorite Mail.app 2.0 plugin) reports:

If you intermittently lose your wireless connection, and you have a netgear rangemax access point, try swapping out the power supply. Apparently the one that comes with it is bad and causes the access point to reboot spontaneously. Since swapping power supplies, I’ve not had any problems with mine.

  • Phill Kenoyer

    I used to, and kinda still do, run a wireless ISP. I have tried many, many wireless routers and they all get corrupted and need to be rebooted. $15 routers and even $500 routers. I even created some home made routers using Linux/FreeBSD and they still get corrupted and need to be rebooted.

    One issue that I had a while back was the Power Save Mode feature. When a laptop goes to sleep it puts the wireless card into sleep mode telling the router to save messages for it. This never works right. It would always lock up the router. Other times it’s from stray 2.4GHz signals. And sometimes from other routers near by.

    $1,000′s of dollars later, still no hope. So my home made routers just reboot themselves twice a day. Some others are on timers.

    Oh, my Apple Airport seems to work very well by the way.

  • http://eric.ferraiuolo.name Eric Ferraiuolo

    Interesting about the Netgear Rangemax. This is the brand-line of router my girlfriend has and I experience this issue; if I’m connected to the thing for long enough I will lose connection then gain it back. Guess I never expected that it was the thing restarting itself, but makes sense for the symptoms I see.

    The Apple AirPort Extreme router I have at my place works very well and usually only needs restarting after a firmware upgrade.

  • Kevin Shea

    “If you’re like me, then your parents have one of these routers.”

  • Sam

    My routers are on timers as well, but still need an occasional reboot in between. Had different brands, although no Apple yet. Reboots are required more often if there are more pc’s connecting. I therefore sometimes think it is stack overflow, i.e. an overflow of the DNS cache or the error/hacking log. For that reason I usually switch off the DHCP for DNS addresses, while leaving on the DHCP for the IP addresses. On the other hand, the temperature of the electronics may also play a role: sometimes my routers are in direct sunlight: more problems.

  • treycranson

    Funny that there are actually two scenarios here:

    1. Routers that reboot themselves
    2. Routers that need periodic rebooting to work

    Does the power supply fix both scenarios?

  • Nick

    With my BT Router machines with USB wireless adapters do not connect until I reboot the router. None of the laptops with inbuilt Wireless adapters have this problem.

    DHCP is setup correctly it just won’t engage unless the router is rebooted. It could be due to assigning IP addresses.

    No I have found out that if I open up the Router Manager software and refresh the channel the connection works without rebooting. Slightly better than restarting the router.

    Hope this helps someone

  • http://www.myrouterip.com/ router ip

    Nice article, but it won’t seem to work with my router ip, any hints?

Grab the RSS feed
Follow ExpanDrive on Twitter Follow us on Twitter


Try ExpanDrive

If you’ve heard of SSH then you need ExpanDrive.



Try Strongspace

Awesome SFTP/rsync online storage by ExpanDrive.