I learned something last night.

Our Internet service provider is Comcast. When we originally had it
set up Comcast provided the wireless router. About a year ago we
were experiencing increasing drop outs of connectivity to the Internet
although our computers and wireless devices connected to the router
fine.

I finally called Comcast and they did some remote tests. They
informed me that our router had come to it's "End of Life". Not
being very IP savvy, I thought that was a hilarious way of saying
"Your router is dead". But it really means it is obsolete in terms
of being able to sync to newer system standards.

So, I went down to Best Buy and bought a new router. Hooked
everything up and it has run fine for the past year .... until a few
days ago.
We started experiencing similar problems that we had encountered with
the original one with very spotty connection to the Internet that kept
dropping out.

Initially I thought maybe the new router was now obsolete also however
I checked the manual that came with it and determined that it was
designed for both D-2.0 and the newest D-3.0 standards.

Turns out Comcast has been upgrading to D-3.0 in our area recently and
the router needed a "reset" to handle it. A simple power down, wait,
and power up does not accomplish the reset. There's a small hole in
the back with a momentary switch that you need to depress for 5
seconds or more while the router is on in order to initialize a reset.
Comcast can do this remotely, but you pay a service charge for it.

Anyway, I pushed the little switch in with a pen, held it for over 5
seconds, and let it reboot. So far, so good. Service has been
stable with none of the drop outs we've been experiencing for about 4
days. On a hunch, I also went to a couple of speed test websites
and discovered our download and upload speeds have increased also.

Thought I'd post this info in case there are other computer age
technology challenged people like me out there.