Question Router Has Started Dropping Wifi Signal

[Carbo]

Purchased a TP-Link Archer A10 in July, 2019, one year ago. It's been working perfect until about two weeks ago when the wifi began dropping two or three times a day. Each time I reboot and it runs fine for a few hours until the next time.
ISP is Xfinity, no outages in my area from them; modem is a Netgear CM1100, (purchased new at the same time, along with all cables), it has remained online without any issue all this time. I don't want to believe a one year old router is already a paperweight. Any suggestions? Thank you.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Do you have any wired clients that are not experiencing the same thing?

Is there any new electronics in the vicinity that may be causing interference?

If you can confirm it's likely the router, sometimes it's just the AC adapter that's going. You may be able to pick up one on the cheap and correct the issue.

 

[Carbo]

The only wired client is my laptop and it, also, cuts out when the issue appears.
No new electronic gizmos in the vicinity.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Ok, in that case, when the issue appears, some trouble shooting is needed. I too have recently had some Comcast issues, but basic tools said it wasn't really my problem

windows tools (commands) used: tracert, ping, nslookup, and www.speedtest.net (or the speedtest windows app), but don't run speed test and others tools simultaneously as it skews the results by consuming the entire connection

From the wired client, open a command prompt and run a trace route to a widely used ip like 8.8.8.8, here's what it looks like when it was failing for me and not my problem. Plenty of other tracert's had response times all over the place as well, this one just had a good amount of timeouts (asterisk's). My router responded fine, but sometimes the router would freak out during the problem, but tracert would typically have my router responded just fine.


open up a command prompt and ping the same IP and see what response you get.

If those look fine, use nslookup www.google.com (or another popular URL) and see if it's just DNS that not working.

After a few days of problems off and on, I called Comcast. The automated service noticed errors on my modem and wanted to reset it, which I said sure. I tend to do what they ask so when I finally make it to a person the system reports I tried first. This corrected the issue for a bit, but the next day I had problems again. So I called Comcast, and this time they reported service in my area. Since then I've had no further issues. *knock on wood*. This was last week and weekend.

 

[JackMDS]

Take out the Router and connect the Laptop directly to the Modem.

If it still does the same it is either the Modem, or the Signal from the ISP.

 

[KentState]

Don't know if this an option, but you may want to change your wifi password. Force everything to be setup again. I've had clients start opening up a ton of connections and at some point, the router can't handle it.

 

[Ord]

TP-Link recently issued a firmware update that made my 5GHz network completely unusable. I finally found a settings combination that worked: Set 5ghz channel to "auto" and, most importantly, disable mu-mimo. That was the only way for me to get a useable 5Ghz network again. I also changed the 5Ghz network from AX to AC, but I don't think that had any affect.