I know there’s no connection between my local area network and our house’s plumbing system, but when the faucet started running uncontrollably literally seconds after I fixed a network outage, I had to wonder: did we have a poltergeist? The jury is still out. But I can tell you that my hour of fruitless examination of router settings is to your benefit: you won’t have to do this when it happens to you.
The weakest TP-Link
As a guy known for Wi-Fi since the early 2000s, you might think my house is ablaze with wireless signals.1 Yes, it is: we have six Wi-Fi access points and gateways in a relatively small house by modern standards (about 1,200 sq. ft. on the main floor and 800 in the finished basement). But we also have Ethernet strung through the house to connect most of them, with powerline networking adapters where that doesn’t work due to the ancient and mysterious innards of the walls. The innards’ outsides are covered with heavy, old plaster, which absorbs some of the power of the Wi-Fi signals—hence the large number of emitters.
Normally, this works fine. We have four TP-Link routers, some purchased a while back, and a Netgear Nighthawk as our primary base station, which distributes network addresses and is connected to the fiber-optic ISP router.2 When something goes wrong, it’s usually an issue with a router crashing, even though its various green lights remain in a happy state.
