A Sydney student on a Superloop plan had their Xiaomi router working fine: one cable from the modem into the router, PPPoE dialled up, WiFi and internet all normal. The trouble started when they ran a second cable from the router to a wall socket, hoping to bring the living-room wall port to life — the moment that cable went in, the router lost its connection and the whole flat went offline. The cause was not a fault: this router has four ports that auto-detect whether each one is WAN (uplink) or LAN, and the extra cable confused that detection.
With one uplink cable the router knew which port was WAN. Adding a second cable into a wall socket gave it two candidate uplinks, and because the ports self-assign WAN/LAN, it re-negotiated the wrong port and dropped the real uplink — so every device lost internet, even though nothing was actually broken.
| Auto-sensing ports | Fixed WAN/LAN ports | |
|---|---|---|
| Plug in | Any port, router decides | Uplink must go in the WAN port |
| Multiple live cables | Can misread a port and drop the uplink | Roles are explicit, less ambiguity |
| How to tell | Look at the port silkscreen and colour: a fixed router labels one port WAN/Internet (often blue or a different colour); auto-sensing routers label all ports the same or say “self-adaptive” in the spec sheet. | |
Root cause: the router's auto-sensing ports re-assigned WAN to the wrong port when a second cable was added, dropping the uplink — not Superloop, not a hardware fault. After changing the port/socket combination and power-cycling, WiFi and the wired living-room port both ran normally.
Call or message us — 90% of messages get a reply within an hour.
Call 0420 119 140 Send a Message