Is the fault in your router or with your internet provider?

Getting it right matters: as long as the blame is in the wrong place, nobody fixes anything. If the problem is yours, your provider will close the ticket without touching anything. If it is your provider’s, changing your router will achieve nothing and you will have wasted money.

Your internet is not one thing, it is three

When someone says ‘the internet is down’, they are talking about three separate segments that almost never fail at the same time, and each one has a different party responsible:

• Your devices and your Wi-Fi. The computer, the phone, the access point, the network cable. Responsible: you, or whoever looks after your IT.
• Your router. The box your provider left you. Responsible: the provider, even though the box sits on your desk.
• The line, from your front door to the rest of the world. The fibre, the local exchange and everything beyond it. Responsible: the provider, no question.

There is also a fourth case that gets confused with the others but is not one of them: the internet is working perfectly and what fails is the specific service you were using. If your management software is in the cloud and its provider is down that morning, neither your router nor your internet provider has anything to do with it.

The four checks, in this order

The order is no accident: each step rules out an entire segment, so doing them out of order wastes time. With the fault in front of you, work from top to bottom.

Order	What to check	What it means
1	Is it failing on one device or on all of them? Take your phone and turn off mobile data so that it uses the office Wi-Fi.	If the phone can get online and the computer cannot, the line is fine: the fault is in that device. That is where this search ends and a different one begins.
2	Does it also fail over a cable? Plug a laptop directly into the router with a network cable.	If it works over the cable but not over Wi-Fi, the line is fine and your provider has nothing to do with it either: it is your Wi-Fi. It is usually channel congestion, distance or an old access point.
3	Does the router respond? Type 192.168.1.1 into your browser (some providers use 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.254).	If the router’s login screen appears, the box is alive and your internal network is working. If nothing appears, the problem lies between your device and the router: the cable, the Wi-Fi or the box itself.
4	What do the router lights say? Look at the one marked ‘Internet’, ‘WAN’ or ‘Fibre’ (‘Fibra’), not the Wi-Fi one.	Solid green: the line is up and the fault lies elsewhere. Red, off or flashing: the line is down, and that is your provider’s responsibility. Take a photo of it with your phone before restarting anything.

How to read the result

With the four answers, you already know whom to call. This table summarises the combinations that come up almost every time:

What you saw	Where the fault is	Whom to call
Only one device fails; the others can get online	In that device	Your IT support. Your provider cannot do anything.
It works over cable, not over Wi-Fi	In your Wi-Fi	Your IT support. It is a matter of coverage or the access point.
The router’s screen will not open from any device	In the router or the office cabling	Your provider first: the router is theirs.
The router’s screen opens, but the internet light is red or off	On the line	Your provider, and get the fault reference number.
Everything is green and everything responds, but one particular program will not open	In that service, not in your network	That program’s supplier.
It comes and goes several times a day, and by the time you call it is working	Almost always on the line, but without evidence they will not accept it	Your provider, but after measuring it. How to do that is explained below.

The three mistakes that make you call the wrong people

• Restarting the router before checking anything. It is the first thing everyone does, and it wipes out the only evidence there was. After the restart the box forgets what was wrong with it, and your provider sees a healthy line.
• Trusting the Wi-Fi bars on your phone. Those bars measure the signal between the phone and the access point, nothing more. Full bars and no internet is a perfectly ordinary combination.
• Assuming that if a website will not open, there is no internet. Sometimes the website that is down is someone else’s. Before blaming the line, open two or three sites that have nothing to do with one another.

The real problem: two hours later, there is no way to know

The four checks work while the fault is in front of you. The case that ruins your week is a different one: the outage lasts three minutes, clears on its own, and by the time you sit down to look at it everything is working. Repeated four times a day for a month, that is an unusable line that is perfect on paper.

At that point no manual check will help, because there is nothing to check when you look. You need something that was watching at the exact moment and wrote it down: what time it started, how long it lasted and which of the three segments the fault was in.

That is exactly what a probe does. Vigilatum installs a program on an office computer that monitors each of those three segments separately and continuously, and stores the result. When something stops responding, your dashboard shows an alert written in plain Spanish that already tells you which of the three segments is involved, without you having to investigate anything. And it is on record, which is what you need for the next conversation: the complaint.