Question Wireless stopped working at a few clients (same ISP) at same time..?

[tankman1989]

Strange occurrence, a couple clients, all with the same DSL ISP, different routers, all had their wireless stop working at the same time (during a system wide internet outage). Normal rebooting of routers and modem doesn't work and replacing routers results in same problem. With one customer I switched to a different router, which worked 100% fine in shop, and when it got to the client, the wired section wouldn't work but the wireless did (which is the opposite of what the original problem is), It was a Linksys WRT54GL.

The DSL modems are set to bridged and they aren't routers/wireless themselves so I don't think the modem hardware is causing the conflict.

If this were only at one location this might not be so strange but for it to happen at multiple locations (different towns) this is really weird.

Any ideas as to where to start? Already tried different routers, same model as they had before and new model at location. All routers worked in shop before going on site to try.

OS's being run are XP. Vista & Win 7, so I don't think it is an update that hosed everything. I guess it could be the wireless card on all the machines but they are all different brands of laptops and at one location I tried 3 different brand laptops (all with builtin wireless) and none worked.

 

[Pants]

Building power maybe? Did you check the voltage at the receptacles with a volt meter? Maybe a voltage monitor plugged into the receptacle would show occasional power dips or spikes. Different towns I know, but you never know

 

[frostbyte5014]

If the DSL modem is in bridge mode there will have to be a router in order to make the DSL connection. You also have the option of taking the modem out of bridge mode. Depends on the quality of the modem and how much stress it can handle.

The Linksys was probably making the connection with PPOE etc.

Depending on the ISP the DSL connection may require a username and password to be setup on the router if you choose to keep in bridged mode.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I'd go do some more investigating and testing...looking for a common denominator.

Perhaps they did a system wide firmware upgrade on the gateways.

Maybe they changed DNS servers and didn't alias their old ones...so if network is still looking for old DNS servers....

Ping test to IP and names would clear up that question in a heartbeat.

 

[Paul Rodgers]

The ISP decided to lock out wireless access and charge customers for the ability to use wireless.

 

[Markverhyden]

According to the OP the modems are bridged so I do not see how the ISP would know that there are wireless packets. A packet is a packet is a packet.

Just to be clear. These routers have regular wired ports and there are wired devices working fine. Also, did you hook up a wireless device to wired to make sure they work?

 

[tankman1989]

According to the OP the modems are bridged so I do not see how the ISP would know that there are wireless packets. A packet is a packet is a packet.

Just to be clear. These routers have regular wired ports and there are wired devices working fine. Also, did you hook up a wireless device to wired to make sure they work?

The wired devices work fine, I could remote into them fine.

I'm not sure what you mean in the bold part: