I have Charter internet – which I hate – and it’s going down constantly – why I hate it. Here in Northern Illinoisland, we’ve been experiencing “intermittent outages” for about 2 weeks. Since I just got my service reconnected last Wednesday, after moving from somewhere with the more reliable Comcast, it’s been nothing but up-down-up-down for the last 6 days. Finally, I think I may have come across a kind of solution. 

Here’s the jist of the problem: your modem will assign your router either (a) no IPs or (b) unroutable local IPs. Sometimes, you’ll get what seem to be routable IPs, but they really aren’t, and you won’t get assigned a DNS address. Your modem will be fucking convinced you have Internet access, when in reality you have jackshit.

Solution: force a hard reboot on the modem.

1. Unplug the router’s power
2. Unplug the modem’s power
3. Unscrew the modem’s coax cable
4. Wait 10 seconds
5. Plug in modem power, modem coax, router power, in that order.
6. Check to see if you have updated and routable IPs (hint: if the IP starts with 192 it’s not routable)