Why is my WiFi broken? Part 2: Mi-Fi

Just an update to my earlier rant about my broken ultrafast broadband… After trying everything including:

1. Two different technicians spending a day each at my house at my cost.
2. Buying an Apple Airport Extreme to generate a wifi network independent to the one generated by the Spark Router.
3. Moving the router and new Airport to different parts of the house with long cables in tow.
4. Buying new cables.
5. Tweeting the @spark technical team every hour for several weeks
6. Ringing different Spark technicians every day.
7. Progressively shutting everything down in the house and restarting one million times.
8. Swearing and cursing the gods of the internet and offering up my first born child.

Spark finally agreed to just send me a new modem… Mostly, I think they did this to stop the campaign of harassment that I was mounting.

And guess what? Everything works now.

Mostly. I still get strange error messages from time to time telling me that another computer is using my IP address. So I guess I’ll have to sort that out at some stage.

But here is what worked for me to unbreak my internets:

• Making my ISP send me a new router.
• Powering down the router for 20 seconds when I have any issues of any kind immediately. This causes it to do something called power cycling which seems to reset most problems.

So there you go… As a side benefit I now have god-like control over my internets.

This includes knowing how to log into my modem and set up rules to turn the internet off on my children’s computers and devices at certain times. Like between 8pm and 6am.

Feels good…