Hi Guys, I've got one of these tiny black modems with my Sky Broadband - speaking to sky tech bod they said that in order for the line to keep its speed I shouldn't turn it off. Apparently the line will think there's a fault and gradually decrease the speed on it, and you would then need to pay for an engineer to reset the line. Now as I'm shortly going away for a few weeks - I'm a little apprehensive about leaving it turned on when noones gonna be around ti keep an eye on it. What to do?? is it true??
Yep, completely true. If you are consistently turning the router off then turning it back on the systems will presume a line fault and lower the speed on the line. Happened to my mate where his mum turned off everything every night and turned it back on in the morning. They ended up at 0.5Mb downstream If you're going away for a few weeks, turn it off. It'll be fine. However, leaving it on isn't going to hurt anything either. As to paying for the line to be retrained, that sounds like crap, you just ring customer services, say your line performance is arse and could they re-train the line please.
You'll be fine turning it off for a few weeks, that shouldn't affect your line speed. The problems are caused when you turn it off each night - the equipment at the exchange sees this as an intermittent fault and automatically tries decreasing the line speed to "correct" the "fault". I think the Sky person is wrong about needing an engineer, though - once you leave your router on all the time, the exchange equipment will try increasing the speed again over time until you're back to full speed. Why are you worried about leaving the router on? It uses a tiny amount of power, so it's not going to be a massive drain on your electricity bill. Why does someone need to keep an eye on it - what do you think it's going to do?
Yes - leave it on, else the line speed may be degraded as a 'fault' could be detected! Routers are fine to leave on, though!
Its not unheard of for small power supplies to fault and start burning. Naturally it's something that is more likely to happen with absolute bargain basement types, but its not irrational to kill devices like this if the house is going to be unoccupied.
Is this an ADSL, Sky, BT thing? I've never experienced it with VM who use DOCSIS so is it something to do with the different ways the tech works? I don't have the first clue how ADSL or DOCSIS handle fault detection.
Thanks guys - I try to be careful when I'm away and turn everything off that doesn't need to be on. It's not a quality router, just your cheap knockout plastic box so was a little worried.
They said it all, really. But I second shadow's mention of cheap wallwart PSUs burning up (literally). A couple of times in living memory I've had them short, overheat massively and melt. It's an uncommon but known cause of house fires. In daily living you'd always notice the melting plastic smell long before it became a hazard, which is why it isn't necessary to turn things off overnight (information that hasn't reached some of my elderly customers, who still turn all their plugs off every night and then wonder why their broadband is slow and their CMOS batteries are flat).
