Help with Router issues- Advice greatly appreciated!

[#1]

Hi,

A couple of months ago my PN router had a bit of a meltdown, so I went out and bought a TP-Link TD-W8980. For a few months it has been great, however have recently been having a few issues and wondering why these are occuring.

The main issue is that websites will go from working perfectly fine, to not loading at all. They often state that it is a result of a DNS problem.(Please see attached image to show what I mean).

I know this is not a lot to go off, but happy to answer any questions. I just find it odd because my Plus Net router did this before I switched to the TP- Link one and obviously don't really want to go out and have to buy another.

Presuming it is something in the settings. If you need an image of these let me know, or any other information I will be happy to provide.

Any help, greatly appreciated!

[#2]

Which DNS Servers are you using on the WAN side of the router? Have you tried changing them to a different provider e.g OpenDNS or Google

Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

OpenDNS: 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123

Change the WAN DNS on the router and let us know how you get on. If the fault stays it points to the router, if it goes away then it points to the DNS services it was currently configured for,

[#3]

Do you mean on the DHCP server?

I had 0.0.0.0 for both. Will give both of those a run and see if it helps! Will update when after a bit of testing!

[#4]

No, not on the DHCP server.

See here:

http://setuprouter.com/router/tp-link/td-w8980/dns.htm

[#5]

Try changing the DNS as suggested, because that is the least hassle first thing to try.

However, those symptoms are likely to be an intermittent fault or poor line quality issue with your connection.

The DNS error message is probably just Windows guessing that the DNS lookup failed, whereas I'm suggesting your router failed to establish a connection with the DNS server because of perhaps a phone line related fault.  Windows would report DNS errors before any other generalized connection fault, as doing a DNS lookup is simply one of the first things a web browser does when you ask it to do something.

Try running through the Plusnet "Broadband Troubleshooter", to see if that reveals anything.

 

[#6]

Hi again,

Thank you to you both. I have now changed the DNS settings suggested and hopefully that helps!

In regard to line issues, I have actually contacted PN and they said that they couldn't find any faults on the line so that should hopefully rule it out.

Other than these random errors, the internet seems to work well so it is a little bit odd.

Thanks again.

[#7]

Hi again, so changing the DNS seems to have helped a lot on the error I was having, so thank you for that.

My only other issue now is that speeds seem to drop off totally after a day or two (mainly in the evenings), it'll drop to around 3mb from the usual consistent 16mb. A reboot of the router sorts it out for a day or two then it'll randomly go down to 3mb again.

Any ideas?

[#8]

the plusnet dns servers have been totally garbage the last few weeks, frequent page not found errors (even on Plusnets own website) I swapped my primary to use google and that's fixed the problems most of the time (except when googles server was unreachable...)

as to the slow down, if your on a fibre product;

check the virtual server interface if your using upnp, it might drop the unused virtual servers but not free up the bandwidth they were using (my billion router does something similar until the upnp interface completely falls over and has to be manually restarted)

it might also be an issue created by the number of devices in the routing table (arp or dhcp) of the router, connection sharing might be reserving bandwidth for stuff that's not connected or has changed its ip address when reconnecting, sometimes things just get "stuck"  especially if you changed the default settings for stuff like renew or lease time, buggy firmware at its worst (happens on a lot of different routers) you can implement a workaround by assigning each of your devices a fixed ip address in the lan setup page based on their mac address and that should stop the slowdown

however if your on adsl ;

then it could be a line quality problem or lots of errors and that would require router stats to start finding the answer as to the problem and someone who is more current with adsl to give pointers on it/

Moderator's note by Dick (Strat) Typo corrected.

[#9]

Just a small update:

Since changing to Google it has been massively improved.

My only new issue is now when I play games (particularly FIFA 16), it seems a lot laggier and connection is often red/yellow rather than green.

Any ideas as to why? are the changes linked?

[#10]

Try OpenDNS instead of Google - see if that fixes things.

Note - there are plenty of free dns places to try too...

[#11]

Will give  that a go! Thanks!

[#12]

Open DNS – which is now part of Cisco – delivers public DNS services in a similar way to Google. Open DNS claims to offer the “world’s largest, fastest and most reliable” DNS service.

The settings are:

208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220

As usual, Gibson supplies the tools - https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

[#13]

DNS will have absolutely no effect on the Lagginess of your Gaming. Particular DNS may speed up how quickly you connect to a site, but once you are connected to your Game Server it won't make the slightest difference.

If you have raised a fault with Plusnet, then there is a very good chance that they have turned on Interleaving and that will have increased your ping/lag. That is one of the first things that they do, whatever your problem is Didn't you know that Interleaving is the panacea for every broadband problem - NOT