cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Anybody else seeing their T3200M Router spontaneously rebooting 7-10 times per week?

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour

This has been going on for some time now.  The Router was replaced, and it made no difference.

I wonder if there are some devices that I may have connected that are known to cause issues like this.

I have a fair number of devices hooked up, and the technician that was here for another reason recently seemed to want to blame that, but I don't think that would be an issue unless they were misbehaving badly or something.  (Smart bulbs and switches, Google Homes, Phones, Tablets, Computers, a couple small Raspberry Pi boards running Linux...)

Businesses use these routers also, and I suspect they very often have much more demanding situations.

I am using 2 bonded DSL lines to get 50Mbps.

 

While typing this I am getting some ideas for troubleshooting actually...

Anyhow, is this something anyone else has seen and hopefully fixed??

Meantime, I have a little old Windows tablet faithfully monitoring the situation, and collecting dates and times of each disconnect.

 

I am skittish about calling support again, since if they determine it's not their fault, they now charge $100.That bothers me a bit.

 

Thanks in Advance!

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour
Well, this concludes this novel of posts! The issue has never come back.

What have we learned? When I moved about 10 smart home devices to another router, it fixed everything. Why?
Could it be the design of the switches? They are sonoff. They DO talk to home pretty frequently, I did some wiresharking. It's a lot of little packets. Does this overwhelm the router? I'm leaning this way.
Or is it the NUMBER of devices as the technician thought? (I really don't think so.)

Either way, someone else will have this trouble, and maybe this overly long blab session will help.

View solution in original post

13 REPLIES 13

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User

Do you have the router connected to a good power bar / surge supressor? If you have dirty power that can affect electronics. I have bonded copper as well and my T3200 is on a surge surpressor and I haven't had it reboot itself that I'm aware of.


If you find a post useful, please give the author a "Like" or mark as an accepted solution if it solves your trouble. 🙂

Interesting thought...  It's on an old UPS that I don't really trust too much, I will try a different surge bar.  Thanks!

When the router was replaced I assume they swapped the power supply as well. If not then that could the the problem.

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour

Nighthawk's comment, which points in the same direction as yours, (power going into the router) got me thinking about whether the adapter included is actually providing enough juice to handle the load.  (It seems to show up mostly when the network is working harder.)

 

So I just ran some tests, having an electronics lab of sorts in my little office here.  When you power up the adapter, it reaches 11.7 of the 12 volts it's rated for.  At 1/6 of its load capacity, (.5A) it drops to 11.5.  At 3 Amps, (full capacity), it's down to 11.1 Volts.  It does maintain that 11.1 right up to 4.3 Amps, (1.3 Over Capacity), which is kind of nice...

I tested for noise on the power, and it was fairly reasonable, at .147V peak to peak, or .042 RMS.  The frequency is 2 or 3 Khz at no load, and above 60 Khz at 3A.  (It's there, but there isn't really enough of it to be a problem.)

 

Conclusions?  The power supply is of decent quality, and it does try to self regulate, but the voltage is around .75V lower than the router is rated for.  It's not losing that voltage in the cable, I tested right at the adapter and it was only a .1V difference.

 

But is this the problem??  One thing to consider; I would guess that most of the guts in the router run at voltages much lower than 12V, that are cut down by the routers internal regulators, however it's very possible that this discrepancy could  still be causing the trouble. 

 

Well, I have another overly capable 12V adapter here that I have swapped in, and time will tell for sure!!  Thanks for the hints guys!  I hadn't thought of looking in this direction, but I probably should have.

 

Stay safe and healthy everyone!

PD

DLathe
Just Moved In

Yes. I'm having the same issue. Telus replace the first router about a year ago and the rebooting problem appeared to be fixed until this January. Now the second TM3200 router reboots randomly. Sometimes it will run for a week without problems and then it will reboot several time in one day. I've moved the router to 3 different locations in our house. Each location used a different power plug and different phone cables. Nothing has helped resolve this problem. 

 

I'm contacting Telus (if I ever get an agent) to get them to sent a new router (not a refurbished one). Once the Covid-19 is over I'll be switching over to Shaw. I never had these problems with Shaw's equipment.

I should have said T3200M not TM3200

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour

A lot of this is area dependent, but I really feel as though you would end up with a bunch of other irritations if you went to Shaw, and in the end it may be worse. 

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour

So I set up a more powerful Power Brick on the router, and I have gone 4 days without a disconnection.

I looked through the logs I made, a couple weeks ago I got an 8 day stretch without reboots, I also got a 4 day stretch once or twice before, but more often then not, it's been every day, or every second day.

I do think I'm onto something, as the load test on the old supply seemed to clearly show a weakness.

Nighthawk
Community Power User
Community Power User

Very interesting. Please update us if you have any additional findings. 🙂


If you find a post useful, please give the author a "Like" or mark as an accepted solution if it solves your trouble. 🙂

You can count on it Nighthawk!

 

So, the beefed up power supply did NOT fix the problem.  I watched the power consumption over some time also.  Most of the time it runs at about .5 amps, when you send data it can go up to 1.5A.

 

So, I was trying to think of other things I could eliminate.  The router has been eliminated, it was replaced some time ago.  Unless it's a flaw in the design or firmware.  The Power supply has been eliminated now.

 

So we either have a bad router design, or something I have hooked up to it, or something further down the copper lines.  (Bonded).

 

I'm leaning away from my devices, even though there are 25 or so.  Smart home!  Bulbs, switches, Google Homes, Chromecasts, Phones, Tablets, Computers, even a 3D printer via a Raspberry Pi, and another Raspberry Pi filtering out all the ads...  The Telus technician seemed eager to point the finger at that some time ago, but these devices have limits, where they will refuse to connect more devices.  I am no where near that.

 

If it's a bad router design, I guess all I can do is hope.  I can also offload the router duties to a router of my own, but I don't know how much hassle that is, I know it requires calls to tech support, and I prefer to leave that as a last resort, since I would very likely have to go through the hassle again to undo it.

 

Since I have 2 lines, and two line connections on the modem/router, I have some things I can try!  I pulled out one of the copper lines and sacrificed half of my speed.  Problem remained.  (This also lowers the load on the modem without fixing anything, that's interesting.)

At this point, I plugged that line back in, and pulled the other one. 

 

That was 4 days ago, and so far, no reboots. 

 

If the problem stays gone, it would implicate either the first port on the router, it's copper line, or the modem on the other end of my copper line.  If I become comfortable that the problem is gone with this test, I will try this line on the other router port, or the other line on this port, eventually both.  If I can narrow things down to that line, I will be able to bring this to Telus!  We'll see!

Sigh.  Well, good news and bad news.

Again, I was on the wrong track.  The good news is,now, I am at 6.5 days with no reboots.

This time, I removed all of the smart lights and switches from my network.  That's it.

There were about 11 devices.  They are made by Sonoff, and the app that controls them is called Ewelink.

These do not use a hub, so each device maintains an IP connection with their servers through the wifi.

So, either their design was the problem, OR there were, as that tech said, just too many devices on my network.  I don't think the quantity was it.

 

Since I pulled these devices, I have gone without a problem for 6.5 days.  That is leaning comfortably away from being a coincidence...

 

Anyhow, I was looking at all the settings in the router, and I came across the one which allows you to used your OWN router, just treating the Telus box as the modem only.  I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was very easy to do this myself, and to learn that the Telus router keeps operating normally, the only difference is that port 1 on the router is a direct line out from the modem that bypasses the entire router.  You can plug your own router's WAN port into port 1, and you have two routers, each having their own IP's, each running independently, and isolated from each other.

 

I have a DIR-825 Dlink router which is flashed with DD-WRT firmware, which is very solid and feature packed firmware.  I set this up as the router from port 1, and then attached all those pesky smart switches and lights to this one.  The original router only has to handle the pre-managed data coming into port one from the second router, and sending it down the line, with even a separate IP for it.

 

So if I am right, and I have finally isolated the problem, now that I have cut WAY down on the number of devices the main router needs to handle, and, hopefully more importantly, have taken all the cheap sonoff devices out of it's list of concerns, I may now have my workaround, and a possible lead for others dealing with this kind of problem.

 

I'll report later on once I am sure one way or another.

phuzzyday
Helpful Neighbour
Well, this concludes this novel of posts! The issue has never come back.

What have we learned? When I moved about 10 smart home devices to another router, it fixed everything. Why?
Could it be the design of the switches? They are sonoff. They DO talk to home pretty frequently, I did some wiresharking. It's a lot of little packets. Does this overwhelm the router? I'm leaning this way.
Or is it the NUMBER of devices as the technician thought? (I really don't think so.)

Either way, someone else will have this trouble, and maybe this overly long blab session will help.

Thanks for the follow up info. IoT devices and such have been known to bring down routers with excessive chatter. The Google Home and Chromecast devices had an issue like this not too long ago.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-keep-google-home-chromecast-from-killing-your-wi-fi/