A student in Zetland on a Telstra 100Mbps plan messaged us with a familiar photo: a Telstra router with every light off. We had seen the exact same failure several times in the previous fortnight — this was roughly the fifth dead unit of the same Telstra router in about two weeks. On-site we confirmed the hardware was gone, swapped in a TP-Link router, and cloned the old WiFi name and password so every device in the flat reconnected by itself.
The line itself was fine — proven later when a replacement router connected straight away and hit the plan speed. When the router in the middle dies, everything behind it goes dark at once: that "whole flat offline at the same moment" pattern usually points at the router, not the line.
| Router hardware failure | Line / provider outage | |
|---|---|---|
| Lights | All off, even after a power cycle (this case) | Router lights on, but the internet light shows a fault |
| Wired LAN test | No link — the computer cannot detect the port | Link comes up; you can reach the router admin page |
| Swap test | A known-good router connects and reaches plan speed (this case) | A known-good router still cannot get online |
Root cause: the Telstra router's hardware had failed outright — no lights, no LAN link even after a power cycle. The replacement TP-Link connected immediately and hit the 100M plan speed, and with the old WiFi name and password cloned, every device in the flat was back online with zero reconfiguration.
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