BLOODY BROADBAND

[MrsForgetful]

Actually...to be more specific...BLOODY VIRGIN!

Without going into details....yet....

is it actually possible to have 4 computers wirelessly connected .....all working....at the same time.....without having to reset the modem/router etc at least 10 times a day?

My DH blames me totally... we were with BT ages ago.... and he is convinced it is 'all virgins fault' ... but i wonder whether this kind of problem is a thing that we'd suffer whatever company we were with?

Yes it is perfectly possible, I often have that many things connected wirelessly at once.

In the end from the broadband providers point of view it doesn't matter how many things connect at once. All it "sees" is your Wireless Router/Modem and it's that thing that then deals with sharing the connection.

What modem/router do you have?

Why do you have to reset?

Do the computers loose internet connection?

Does the wireless connection itself drop?

Of course it is - wot Badger says really...is your router (if you have 4 things running then you should be running a proper router so that it can 'route' traffic) set up properly? Has your line been checked? Is your router losing its connection to the internet or is your wireless connection dropping out?

(Easiest way to check that is to attach laptop to router with a LAN cable next time the connection goes then see if the router is still connected. If it is, then your wired connection will work fine.)

Sometimes the wireless transmitter on a router can fail over time; you can either install a new router or buy a booster transmitter to attach to the router.

If you have Virgin via cable this may not apply (I think Virgin do both kinds) but it might to others anyway.

With any broadband that uses a BT phone line the line itself can be faulty. One way to test that is to turn off and unplug everything else and plug a standard (not digital/cordless etc) phone into the main BT socket (usually in the hall)

If you dial 17070 and then 2 for 'quiet line' when asked by the automated voice it just goes silent and lets you listen for crackling on the line.

If you hear anything at all you can then complain to BT about the voice line being noisy (without mentioning broadband) and when they fix that it solves the other problems too.

Oh one more thing while I think of it. I don't use wireless, but the router should have the option to pick another channel for better reception. I don't think it is that in this case though.

(unlikely to apply, onagar, as there's a good chance that the OP has Virgin cable and the router would be different, with no BT-style phone interface.)

One thing which can sometimes go wrong, if lots of people have lots of external links open (eg more than a couple of PCs doing file sharing, and hundreds of connections), is that some routers will simply run out of free memory.

When a local PC makes a connection to an external site, the router has to track which local PC called that remote site, so that traffic coming back in can go to the correct local PC. If several PCs start file sharing, then each file being downloaded/ uploaded can have dozens of 'peers' and the number of connections handled by the router can overload it. Is this a possibility in your case, MrsF ? (perhaps a teenager or two is sharing without you knowing!!)