Do you switch your router/internet off at night?

ClarkeKent

Always turn our Netgear Sky router off when I go to bed. However when I visited my Dad who has Plusnet, he is instucted to always leave the router on according to Plusnet.

Do you switch your router off? (daily, nightly etc)

flashg67

They don't use much electricity - a few watts at most.
Constantly powering of the router will make your broadband 'think' there I fault and can cause your line to reset to a lower speed to compensate for the 'faults'


Leave it on 24/7 is the most common advice.

[Deleted User]

flashg67 wrote: »

Constantly powering of the router will make your broadband 'think' there I fault and can cause your line to reset to a lower speed to compensate for the 'faults'.

How could you possibly justify this statement? This is hilarious!

duchy

ciaccino wrote: »

How could you possibly justify this statement? This is hilarious!

Actually it's correct

The other good reason to do it is that any updates to the router will be sent in the wee small hours .

[Deleted User]

duchy wrote: »

Actually it's correct

Then you have to give me a technical explanation of this phenomenon. This is the first time I hear it.

duchy wrote: »

The other good reason to do it is that any updates to the router will be sent in the wee small hours .

Then the next time the router connects to the Internet the updates will be downloaded.

Actually it's good to reboot the router to clear the DNS and DHCP cache.

Johnmcl7

ciaccino wrote: »

How could you possibly justify this statement? This is hilarious!

If the ISP sees the router constantly dropping sync, they may switch to a lower line speed believing that the dropped connection is due to the line speed being too high for the amount of noise on the line and drop the line speed to compensate. I suspect once a day probably wouldn't be an issue but I've seen it a couple of times with faulty routers that have frequently restarted and the line speed has plummeted.

With regards to the original question, I leave my router on overnight as that's when I do the bulk of my downloading as the connection is uncapped at that point and no-one else is using the connection. Plus I don't have fibre and game downloads/patches just seem to be ballooning in size at the moment.

John

grumpycrab

ciaccino wrote: »

Then you have to give me a technical explanation of this phenomenon.

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/speed_tips.shtml#router

somersethillbilly

"Do you switch your router/internet off at night?"

Was n't that a song by Lonnie Donegan?

poppy10_2

ciaccino wrote: »

How could you possibly justify this statement? This is hilarious!

He was completely right. Repeatedly switching your router off could well lower your line speed.

As others have also pointed out, firmware updates are also usually sent out in the early hours of the morning, so you could miss out on those, just for the sake of saving less than a fiver in electricity costs over the course of a year.

windup

Always, without any ill-effects whatsoever, people who say otherwise are unlikely to have tested it.

Can or could have ill-effects is not does. Regularly is an equally vague and meaningless term which provides no useful information to the reader, it could mean every millisecond, every year, every decade.

RumRat

Plugged it in when I first received it and haven't looked at it since. I've never seen the point of turning it off.