Time Capsule and Powerline Adaptors - Internet periodically freezing

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Level 1

4 points

Time Capsule and Powerline Adaptors - Internet periodically freezing

Hi all,

I hope you can help with a problem I am having with my home network. The Virgin Media broadband in my home arrives in my home office and, in the past, when I connect my Time Capsule to the VM router and use it to generate a wireless network I get a very poor wifi signal in the rest of the house - the office is at one end of the property and I suspect there are several metal beams in the wall blocking the signal.

So, to improve the network I bought some TP-Link Powerline adaptors. I have run an ethernet cable from the VM router to one adaptor, put the second adaptor in the living room and attached an ethernet cable from the adaptor to the Time Capsule. The wifi signal from the Time Capsule is now excellent in all parts of the house, but, for some reason, the internet periodically "freezes" on any wifi or wired device that I attach to the TC. There is no issue with the wifi reception - all the devices continue to be attached to the TC with great reception. The broadband service is also not at fault - I have an iMac connected directly to the VM router in the office and the internet continues to run perfectly on that computer during these outages. Each outage lasts 1-2 minutes, occurs about every 5 minutes and during that time I am not able to do anything on the internet - it is not related to a particular site

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what is going on?

Posted on May 29, 2014 8:53 AM

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Answer 1

May 29, 2014 2:26 PM in response to eeperman

Powerline adapters are not ethernet cables.. they have their own issues.

Test the setup by plugging a laptop/nearby computer into the powerline adapter and see if you have issues at all. Load it up since the TC is going to run it fairly hard with multiple computers connected.. ie Run a few downloads and do browsing etc at the same time.. check the actual speed of the link and how stable it is.

If it is fine, then the issue is the TC.

Alternatively just get another router, eg TP-Link WDR3600 which is only about $70-80. Borrow one from a friend. If that has no problems then you can pretty well say the issue is TC.

In that case we need to know exactly which TC running exactly which firmware. This issue is well known in the later AC model.. it is caused by some issue with the WAN port not holding the line correctly. You may need to do a bit of work on it and sadly apple have removed logging and lots of abilities from the TC so it is now pretty hard to do any realistic testing. Hence if the new router works.. keep it and set the TC as a Wireless AP.

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Answer 2

eeperman Author

Level 1

4 points

May 30, 2014 2:43 AM in response to LaPastenague

Thanks for the input. The TC is the latest version running 7.7.3. As an interim measure I have ordered another Powerline adaptor since the one that is connected to the TC is actually a wireless extender with several ethernet ports - I thought it might be simpler to have an ordinary extender.

If that doesn't work then I will have to go down the extra router line...

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