A few weeks ago, we put a new cabinet in the living room and rearranged some things to make space for it. The router was moved on top of the cabinet, so it’s now a bit higher and two meters further away from the phone jack. Suddenly, the internet connection became unstable and would reconnect…
Telekom support is exemplary
At first, I didn’t have time for troubleshooting. Although the reconnection happened more than ten times a day, it was so fast that we usually didn’t notice it. But someone who did notice was Deutsche Telekom. Three days after the problems started, I received a text message. Deutsche Telekom had detected that we had a problem with our connection. They wanted to help us and said we should call the hotline.
To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised: proactive communication with the customer when they have problems—where do you still find that?
However, the timing was inconvenient: three days later, we were leaving for vacation, and I didn’t want to go to Italy with a half-finished troubleshooting process. So I ignored the text message and spent the next three weeks on the beach.
The problem didn’t magically disappear
Three weeks later, I was curious. Was it possibly an external problem that had been resolved? No, unfortunately, it wasn’t. On the contrary, the problem had even worsened and was now becoming annoying. I was kicked out of meetings while working from home, GeForce Now was interrupted, VoIP was cut off, and so on.
I had already mentally prepared myself for the phone call with Telekom. But first, I thought about where the problem could be coming from. I quickly made the connection to the relocation of the FRITZ!Box. The assumption was that something went wrong during that process. First, I checked the router’s temperatures. Maybe it wasn’t getting enough air on top of the cabinet? No, that wasn’t it.
But the cable from the phone jack to the router was now hanging in the air instead of lying relaxed behind the TV cabinet. The router was five meters away from the phone jack—which corresponded to the maximum cable length.
A shot in the dark, and a direct hit
The cable is quite old and came with the router. My guess was that the quality of the cable wasn’t very high and, accordingly, it didn’t react well to being stretched taut in the air.
So before I had a Telekom technician come over, I thought it was worth a try. I quickly ordered a longer cable on Amazon and made sure the quality was good. Instead of a cheap wire, I chose a cable made of pure copper. It was ten meters long, twice as long as before.
What can I say? The cable was delivered, I replaced the old one with the new one, and restarted the connection. Since then, there hasn’t been a single disconnection. Sometimes, it’s just a cheap old cable. Even if they all look the same from the outside, a proper cable can make a significant difference. And it can save you a phone call with Deutsche Telekom.
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