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Troubleshoot your connection

Work through these in order. They are arranged by how often they actually resolve the problem, not by how technical they are.

1. Restart your modem

Unplug the power, wait a full 30 seconds, then plug it back in. Give it up to five minutes to reconnect — the lights will settle once it has. This resolves the majority of faults, and it is worth doing before anything else.

2. Check the cables

  • The power cable is firmly in the modem and the wall.
  • The internet cable runs from the modem's WAN port to your NBN connection box or wall socket. On most modems the WAN port is a different colour to the others.
  • No cable is visibly kinked, crushed by furniture, or chewed.

3. Work out whether it is the internet or the Wi-Fi

Plug a laptop directly into the modem with an ethernet cable. If that works, your internet is fine and the problem is Wi-Fi — see Wi-Fi dropping out below. If it still does not work, the fault is upstream of your Wi-Fi.

4. Check the lights on your NBN connection box

If your connection box has a red light, or the power light is off entirely, note which lights are on and which are off before you call us. That tells us a great deal and saves you being walked through the steps above a second time.

Wi-Fi dropping out in some rooms

This is usually distance and interference rather than a fault:

  • Move the modem into the open — not inside a cabinet, behind a TV, or on the floor.
  • Keep it away from microwaves, cordless phones and baby monitors, which share the 2.4GHz band.
  • Devices further from the modem will get lower speeds. That is physics, not a fault, and a mesh extender is the usual fix for a large or multi-storey home.

Slow speeds

  • Run a speed test over ethernet, not Wi-Fi — Wi-Fi will almost always test slower and is not what your plan speed refers to.
  • Test in the evening and again in the morning. Evening congestion looks like a fault but is not one.
  • Check nothing else on the connection is using it heavily — a console downloading an update will consume everything available.

Still stuck?

Give us a call. Have ready: what the modem lights are doing, whether ethernet works, and roughly when the problem started. Those three answers get you to a fix much faster.