Good point. For some reason this morning my brain wasn’t correlating wifi with gateway router either.
Its not always the router. My ISP (the only option where I’m at aside from dial-up) is unreliable. The connection routinely borks the router/modem some how requiring a power cycle. It happens twice daily at work (a problem because our credit card machines run on that shit), and at least once a month at home. For a while there the home connection would go down for hours at a time on a daily basis. Thought it was the router so I swapped it out. Thought it was network settings so dug into the nitty gritty about a dozen times. Eventually ended up calling the ISP for the 40th time and got someone who wasn’t an idiot. Turns out we had never received scheduled modem upgrades in all our time with the connection (over 10 years). Our rented modem was no longer compatible with the internet. ISP didn’t think that was a problem, it took a couple weeks to convince them to send out a new one (I was disallowed from buying one by the rest of the household for some reason). Its much more reliable now, but at least every couple of months I’m on the live chat (which I’ve discovered is the only reliable way to get help) requesting they do a reset of some sort from the ISP end.
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My mistake. I misread it. But I still think the device is a little hinky, because when multinet.io does go out of business, those millions of zombie plugs will certainly “annoy” the remaining hosts on its To-Ping list.
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I’ve got a DSL modem and a separate router, and when the DSL loses sync (rarely, but it happened twice this morning : -) I have to reboot the modem. Depending on how you’ve got things configured, the problem could be that the router has a DHCP lease from either the modem or the network behind it, and rebooting the modem loses the server end of the lease without telling the router it needs to ask for a new one. The ResetPlug would be a lot more useful if it had an adjustable timer, e.g. wait N1 seconds, power down, wait N2 seconds, power back up.
Can’t help you with the Roku, which is presumably going through your router.
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We had similarish issues when we were dealing with the connection problems I outlined below. A major part of the issue was that our old router (a ten year old WRT54GL) was old enough that it wasn’t designed to connect to as many devices as we were using. Apparently the older routers can’t handle more than a few wifi connections, and too many will cause it to lock up. So with a roku, 3 laptops, 2 desktops we were fine. But once you added between 3 and 5 phones to the equation the whole connection would die. And we couldn’t add anything else to the network without completely shutting the whole thing down, we had to shut off a TVs “smart” features because with them on the internet ceased to exist. A new router solved the issue. You might also want to try and get a new cable box out of your cable company, and fresh modem. With the cable and internets typically running on the same system/lines and connection its turned out best for us to keep all of it as updated as possible.
Trying to trouble shoot all this bullshit introduced me to the concept that networked/cable equipment has somepoint in the last 5 years started functioning completely differently. Equipment that’s old enough just can’t function reliably these days. Which was a new one on me. I’ve got an old 486 Win 3.1 PC in the basement that still runs like a swiss watch.
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Fixed that for you.
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WTF do these people report on tech devices and comment like this when they obviously NO IDEA why you would want one of these. I travel all the time and there are many times when your internet goes down. I have the top of the line router so that isn’t the problem. It is with the broadband modem so yes, these plugs are invaluable to me. If you are going to report on tech stuff that is great but keep your inaccurate comments out of it. If you said what you said just to get a load of comments then you did good!
Is it detecting that there’s an actual data connection, or that it has a wireless connection to the router? If it’s the former, that would actually be useful. But if it’s just the latter, no thanks. When I need to reboot my router, it’s usually because it no longer has a data connection. But it still has a good wireless connection to my local devices.
You unplug your router from the wall and take it with you when you travel? Do you pack your desktop and a big spool of cat5 so you can stay connected as well?
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It is the former.
It tries contacting (most likely pinging) a list of servers on the Net. Which would be impossible via wifi-only detection.
Excellent idea. I’ve had plenty of experience with ISP-provided DSL modems going down. I could walk down two flights of stairs, reset it, walk back up and be online right away, or wait an hour for it to reconnect on its own.
In the evening when there was no-one on-site, our web sites and everything else would be out for the hour.
Now we’ve switched to Shaw. My home service is rock-solid, but the cable modem at the office goes down once a week. Cycling the power brings it back about half the time.
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This video is a corruption of the useless box. The whole point of the useless box is that it doesn’t do anything else.
This video is why the terrorists hate us.
I think what ercadm is trying to describe is losing remote access to one’s home machine because one’s home connection has gone down. Pretty much every available solution requires physical access to the DSL/cable modem at that point, and if you’re across the country at that moment, tough luck.
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Aaaaah. That makes more sense.
…until someone wants $60 for it 
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I think there’s a more entertaining scenario: when a squatter or spammer unwittingly snaps up the vacated domain, they’ll be the ones annoyed with millions (though let’s be honest, we’re probably talking thousands rather than millions) of zombie plugs pinging them.
I can imagine the tech support calls now:
“Why does it reboot my router when I am microwaving leftovers??”
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A classic case of treating the symptom instead of solving the problem.
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The pigtail looks pretty sweet; it also states that it has an energy meter built-in. That’s just a win all around. Now I’d have to set up some Z-Wave functionality at home, but…
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There are days when all you can get is some palliative care.
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