Router use in coffee shops public settings, Non commercial router for dynamic users, Mac address limitations, Reset router wait 10 seconds not myth
A friend of mine has a coffee shop that I frequent.
He recently went to Time Warner Business class and installed a faster router.
When the router was up the speed was fast.
But it began malfunctioning adn requiring numerous resets.
Time Warner technicians came out, diagnosed their equipment and performance and discussed the results and possible problem areas.
I happened to be present then and the question of Mac addresses came up.
I did some research and the new non commercial Linksys router has a limitation of 32 Mac addresses.
After some trial and error testing and more discussions my friend had his technical support person make some adjustments.
This solution seems to work.
There is now a guest signon screen. In this setting many of the customers have computers and almost all smart phones.
It does not take too many customers to hit the 32 Mac address limit.
Also, the router is reset, unplugged, several times a day.
After unplugging, 10 seconds are waited before plugging back in.
This is not a myth. They learned the hard way.
I told them to wait 10 seconds and that has worked.
You may wonder why.
From How To Geek.
“SuperUser contributor Phoshi offers a great, concise reason why it’s a valid procedure:
A lot of modern technology contains capacitors! These are like energy buckets, little batteries that fill up when you put a current through them, and discharge otherwise. 10 seconds is the time it takes most capacitors to discharge enough for the electronics they’re powering to stop working. That’s why when you turn your PC off at the wall, things like an LED on your motherboard take a few seconds to disappear. You probably could wait a different time, but 10 seconds is the shortest time you can be sure everything’s discharged.
Why fully powering down the device matters hinges on how data is temporarily stored in it. A typical modem or router has two types of memory: Non-volatile Memory (NVRAM) and regular old Random Access Memory (RAM) like the kind in your computer. The router boots off the code stored in the NVRAM and then uses the RAM just like your computer would to write temporary variables, execute code, etc. By fully powering down the device and letting the electrical charges dissipate, the RAM is wiped and, upon rebooting the device, the micro operating system in the device has clear RAM to use.”
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