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Technicolor TC7200 router freezes under load – solution

I have a Technicolor TC7200 cable modem/router which was forced on me by my cable provider (UPC). After one of the automatic firmware updates last year, I started having intermittent problems with stability. The router would suddenly “freeze” with the following symptoms:

  • No websites can be opened
  • DNS requests fail
  • Existing connections keep working (all downloads started before the freeze just keep going)
  • Other machines connected to the same router work fine
  • If you do nothing, connectivity will come back after a while (10 minutes?)
  • Right-clicking the network adapter in Windows and choosing Diagnose successfully restores connectivity, even though Windows reports no issues.

The issue would mostly arise under heavy load. Whenever I opened a lot of new connections (for example, many concurrent downloads, streaming video in several tabs, multiple torrents downloading), I could be reasonably sure that a freeze would occur within 1-20 minutes. It would also occur 1-2 times a day regardless of the load.

Solution

The Technicolor TC7200 does not work properly if you change its default IP address. I had changed the router’s IP address from the default (192.168.0.1) to 192.168.1.1 because that was the address of my previous router and I wanted to spare myself some reconfiguration.

Changing the address of the router back to 192.168.0.1 (and moving all the devices on my LAN back to the 192.168.0.xxx subnet) has completely eliminated the issue. For the past month or so, I’ve had zero freezes despite my attempts to trigger one. Just to be sure, I briefly changed the subnet to 192.168.1.xxx, and – you guessed it – the issue came back.

Polish version

Router Technicolor TC7200 instalowany standardowo przez UPC nie obsługuje prawidłowo sieci lokalnych, których podsieć jest inna niż domyślna (192.168.0.xxx). W przypadku ustawienia w panelu administracyjnym adresu routera innego niż 192.168.0.1 (czyli np. 192.168.1.1), urządzenie zacznie od czasu do czasu się “zawieszać”, a dokładniej blokować możliwość nawiązywania nowych połączeń z danego komputera (wygląda to tak, że nie otwierają się nowe strony, nie działa DNS). Charakterystyczne jest to, że dotychczasowe połączenia trwają nadal (czyli np. pobieranie pliku rozpoczęte przed “zwisem” będzie kontynuowane) oraz że inne urządzenia w tym samym LAN-ie działają w tym czasie bez zarzutu. Problem pojawia się zwłaszcza pod obciążeniem – w przypadku otwarcia wielu połączeń, pobierania/wysyłania dużej ilości danych. Po powrocie do domyślnej podsieci (192.168.0.xxx) problem znika.

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