UUronL

Here's a possible explanation for the OP and his buddy 13 miles away seeing the same issues. Is your wireless router under "management" from your ISP? It's possible that they pushed an update to their customers... one that created this issue - say, a firmware that was designed for a similar model without a wifi chipset, or perhaps a model with a different chipset. This could have killed the wifi on the router. An additional update or change could have been made later that corrected it.

This could have also knocked out a good number of other visible wifi networks close to you, explaining the lack of networks returned by the search util.

Rudy

And that's why they pay you the big bucks UURonL...

That explanation is clearly the kind of thinking that only a few people would come up with -- but it's entirely possible that something like that happened! (At least until the OP tells you that the friend 13 miles away was on a different provider... )

briangre

I'm actually happy to see this post as I've been experiencing this for the past 3 months everytime we have a thunderstorm.. I'm in NC.

I've been asking around, but getting no definitive answers.. it just seems very unlikely to me that there is power disturbance that would affect this and not other electrical devices in my home, right? (but then again i'm not an electrical engineer so I really have no idea)..

UUronL

Yeah, this is odd. I can't think of a reason that the network should be affected inside your house if the equipment is operating properly.


The only scenario I can think of that might cause a disturbance in home Internet during a storm is if there is a Provider backhaul component that consists of microwave or millimeter wave links (tower-to-tower). In heavy storms, the effective capacity of such links would be reduced, and any users going through those links would see diminished throughput.

Such a scenario would not affect your WiFi, and would impact all access - unlike what people are reporting here.


General rule of thumb with anything IT related - make sure you're on the latest stable build of everything. Update the router firmware if it's not on the latest. Update the drivers on your PCs, patch everything, etc... Set the WiFi network statically, not via search.



Here's another scenario - I'm surprised it took me this long to think of this:


Your WiFi router blips/reboots (tiny power anomaly) and has to reboot. Your PC or laptop stays up, and the WiFi adapter is set to grab the next available network if the preferred isn't available. It connects (maybe to a neighbor's), but the network is secured, so you are dead in the water.

pinguhk

yes when playing online games there is a big lag.
last month the hole of our village was out with the internet for 2 day.