What should you do if your home suddenly loses internet? Don't rush to call for repairs. I'll check in this order, and in five minutes it'll be to know who's to blame

Thursday night at 9 p.m., the home internet suddenly shut down: the child's online class screen froze, the TV started spinning, and the documents I hadn't saved on my computer turned gray. The elderly's first reaction was to call for repair, and I ran barefoot to the weak current box—don't rush, I've gone through this sequence several times before, from the device to the optical modem, then the carrier. In five minutes, you can determine whose fault it is, and in 90% of cases, you don't have to wait for the technician to arrive.

the first step is always to distinguish: one unit breaks or the whole house breaks

the term 'internet disconnection' is too vague. The first thing I did wasn't look at the light mode, but called my family to pull out all their phones: Does your phone have internet? Can TVs cast their screens? If all the devices in the house crash together, that's a network issue—keep investigating. If only one device is disconnected, it's most likely the device's own problem and has nothing to do with broadband.

I have had one misunderstanding. That time, the whole house was fine, except my phone had no internet. After half an hour of trying to restart my phone and change my WiFi password, I finally found out that my own VPN node was down—turning off the VPN was instantly full. I've encountered this kind of 'fake network disconnection' three times later, and it's always the VPN or proxy's fault. Besides VPNs, there are two common situations: the phone has a random MAC enabled, which I previously blocked on the router, and even after switching to a virtual identity, the router still refuses to recognize it. I've written about MAC address recognition mechanism specifically for me; The other is when the device is dormant and hasn't woken up, most commonly with the TV box. You can just turn off the remote control and turn it back on.

really confirmed the whole house was broken before moving down. Don't get the order confused: first optical modem, then router, and finally the carrier. I've seen too many people call 10,000 as soon as the internet goes off, wait in line for twenty minutes, and when the technician calls to ask, the optical modem power supply was loosened by the robot vacuum.

Second Glance Light Modem: Three lights represent its medical record book

squatted in front of the weak current box; the few lights on the optical modem were its most honest medical record book. No need to remember too much, just three are enough:

LOS red flash and PON flash, you can basically jump straight to the repair request stage. Trying to mess with it yourself is pointless—it's because the optical path is broken—either the fibers in the hallway have a problem, or the weld joint oxidizes. Last autumn, my home experienced this: LOS started flashing at 10 p.m., and the next day a technician came to check the cold joint in the hallway for oxidation. After the fused fiber was done, the backend light decay reading dropped from -31dBm to -21dBm, and it didn't happen again for half a year. I've compiled a more comprehensive comparison chart for lamp language. the five lights of the light modem each represent a , just read aloud.

if the lights are all green and the optical modem looks normal but there's no internet—don't rush to doubt the device; carrier-side bill arrears and area faults are exactly what they look like. My broadband expired for one year but forgot to renew. The lights are all green, WiFi is full, but I just can't open the webpage. I checked the carrier's app and found three months of overdue fees. After paying, I got back to the internet. There's another trick for overdue bills: the integrated plan with your phone number is suspended, and broadband stops along with it. the plan rules of three carriers I've gone through them all when I paid before.

the modem is fine, you should suspect the router

the modem lights are all correct, the next suspect is the router. Let's start with the simplest question: Is the WiFi name still on the list? If your phone can't find your home WiFi, it's like the router is completely dead for you to see—this method means you just unplug the battery, wait thirty seconds before plugging it in, and wait two minutes for it to recover. Note: This is a power unplug and restart, not a reset button! Reset is a factory reset, clearing all broadband accounts and WiFi passwords. That's a disaster when the internet goes down. reboot and reset I only know this from the experience.

router crashes are cumulative. When my old AC2100 crashed, I checked the backend and saw it had run for over 900 hours without rebooting. The 5G band was hot to handle. After recharging, I set it to a weekly scheduled restart and quieted it down. where the timed restarts of each brand are hidden Mercury is called "auto-cleanup." I searched all night.

there's an even more troublesome situation to mention: the router keeps restarting, sometimes good, sometimes broken, and no matter how you try, it can't be fixed—90% of the time the power adapter is old. I used a multimeter to measure a 12V router. The original connector measured normally with no load loaded, but with the load on, the output dropped to just 9V, and the router kept faltering and barely functioning. Replace with a power supply of the same specification for about 30 yuan. three hard rules for power adapters (voltage is exactly right, current is only high but not small, polar is reversed). Must-read before replacement.

there's another disconnect that is very distinctive: half the devices at home have internet, and the other half doesn't. This isn't some mystery; it's that the DHCP address pool or lease has issues. Restarting the router usually saves the issue, but if it repeats, you have to check the address pool settings in the backend. What exactly DHCP doing I figured out the night I accidentally turned it off.

devices are working fine but still no internet: two pings blame the carrier

this point, the modem light is working, the router is alive, but you just can't get online, so you have to break the link for verification. The cleanest method: take your laptop and plug the network cable directly into the optical modem's network port 1 (don't plug it into the IPTV port, that port is isolated), dial up the computer, or just check if you can access the internet. If it works, the blame lies in the section from the router to the optical modem; If you can't get it, the blame is on the optical modem, not the home equipment.

you don't want to plug in cables, there are soft options: set up two ping times on your computer:

ping 192.168.1.1 -t
ping 223.5.5.5 -t

first test your gateway; normally, it is stable within 1ms; Article 2: Measure public network exports. My area failure was based on this set of numbers: the gateway didn't move at all for 1ms, and the public network had 100% packet loss—the router and optical modem in the middle were innocent, but the section above the cell was down. Call 10000 to request repair, clearly state 'Gateway pass and public network lost,' customer service directly creates a local fault work order, and returns to the network within two hours. If you're connected to the landlord's secondary broadband or the community's own network, you don't even need to call 10,000—just ask the landlord to restart their main route. the small bit of broadband in urban villages I only saw through it after living in two buildings.

If you really want to request repairs, prepare three things first

confirm the fault lies with the carrier, don't dial the repair hotline empty-handed. What drivers and customer service most want to hear is data, not adjectives. Before every repair request, I prepare three things:

First, light decay reading . The optical modem backend (mostly 192.168.2.1, account according to the device sticker) has a 'Receiving Optical Power' status page. Below -28dBm is considered healthy, and above -30, it's basically a matter of the circuit. How to read this number and how to classify it? I once wrote a complete light degradation self-check. When requesting repairs, just state the numbers directly, and the technician will know whether to bring a fusion fiber machine or a photovoltaic power meter.

Second, of outage time records. At what point do you break off, how often do you return, how many times in a day. I used to disconnect irregularly, and after a month of timelines, I realized it was always from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. That's ITMS midnight deployment and has nothing to do with hardware— network disconnection patterns all four types of patterns have solutions. If you could also report to customer service that "every day around 9 PM and the service lasts ten minutes," the priority of the work order would be different.

third, photos and model of modem lights. The first thing customer service said was always to ask what the lights looked like, and they sent the photos directly. The model is at the bottom of the body, so the technician can decide in advance whether to replace the cat or fix the cable.