I have a Dlink DI713p router communicating with 2 computers by wired ethernet and a printer with a LAN card. The computers also have wireless cards (802.11b). Netwrk has been working for about 3 years. Over last week, one of the computers started losing the wired connection constantly. I swapped cables and ports on router - limited success. The other day the wired connections on all 3 devisces stopped working but wireless was working.

I eventually got the wored connections working again by adjusting settings on all 3 devices to 10 Mbps. Previously they were all set to automatic detect speed. Seting speed back to 100 Mbps or auto detect causes wired link to fail again.

Is this a normal wearout failure mode for a router? Powering the router off and on doesn't help.

Re: Router only works at low speed

The normal pattern of failures for an electronic device - ie, one with no moving parts to wear out - is a lot of failures early due to manuifacturing faults, followed by a long period of reliability, then a gradually increasing level of unreliability as degradation of components occur. These phases are sometimes called childhood mortality, middle age and senility.

Your system seems to have moved into the seniity phase where components have started breaking down. Problems as this phase can bec because of internal components like electrolytic capacitors which undergo chemical physical breakdown over time - you can't do anything about them - and wear and corrosion in electrical contacts. Contacts on plugs and sockets are only designed for a certain number of insertions, and after more than that the surface coating can wear away leaving material exposed that corrodes more easily and has higher resistance. Higher resistance can causes lots of errors at 100 Mb/s, preventing it from operating reliable, while not causing any niticeable level of problems at 10 Mb/s.

Sometimes surface corrosion of the sort that increases contact resistance and causes errors in high speed operation can be cleaned off by just unplugging things and replugging them. And maybe cleaning the contacts. But once you get to that stage in a device's life you can expect the problems to come back more and more quickly.

Re: Router only works at low speed

It may be time for a replacement. Consider trying a new power supply first though. I have a hub which appeared to be dying - it would drop out often. Replacing the plug pack fixed it. Also a factory reset might be worth trying - you should have a reset button. Pressing it will wipe everything and set it back to original defaults.

Chris B