Will turning off modem at night or day affect speed?

[csgohan4]

As the title, I am considering powering off the modem during the night and some of the day if I am not at home to reduce energy costs.

Will this affect line stability as previous suppliers said not to turn off or the system will think there is problem with the line stability/noise and reduce speeds accordingly

[jem101 · Accepted solution]

No it won’t make any difference at all. Except that every now and again VM push updates to the hub overnight, so if your’s is off then it won’t get the update until the next time your turn it on, at which point it might well download it and then decide to restart itself, which might be a bit annoying.

Otherwise then there isn’t a problem with powering it off, with regard to line speed, the VM system doesn’t work in that same way as an ‘Openreach’ DSL connection.

[csgohan4]

thanks for clarifying, out of curiosity, is it because the copper DSL is more 'fragile' compared to Fibre optic

[jem101]

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@csgohan4 wrote:

thanks for clarifying, out of curiosity, is it because the copper DSL is more 'fragile' compared to Fibre optic

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Not really, no, it’s more to do with the underlaying way that data is encoded and sent down the physical medium. VM uses a technology called DOCSIS, but to explain it fully requires a bit of a history lesson, but originally this was all about cable TV provision, supplied over a coax copper cable (in fact the first three letters of DOCSIS stands for data over coax). Internet provision was a bit of an afterthought, in theory a coax cable can easily provide 10 megabit per second connectivity, but the issue is ‘can you actually do this given all the other constraints’?

Think of it like driving a car, if there were no legal speed limits, then the M25 is built is such a way that I could easily and safely drive at 120 MPH around it, except I can’t because there are other people using it who are driving slower and blocking the lanes, just as I need to share the M25 with others, you need to share the cable connection - and this is especially true for the upstream speed, hence the, apparently, ridiculous ‘why can I get a gigabit download but am restricted to only 50 Mb/s upload?’ Honesty, there really is a good reason for it!

All I can possibly suggest is that you, if you can be bothered and want to know, do a bit of research into DOCSIS technology, how it all works and why the, apparent, limitations are there.

John

[csgohan4]

Again very helpful, will look into this as it seem interesting. Glad to know I can save a few pennies switching my modem and external Fibre box down

[jpeg1]

The only other consideration is that if you have a lot of Wi-Fi devices, although they should all reconnect normally when you turn the router back on, you may find that an odd one tries to connect on a different frequency band or not at all.  Just something to look out for. 

[ALF28]

Switching off modem at night.?

I do switch off my VM hub (modem) at night as well as my own router and "always have done", mainly in my case because it is in a bedroom and the bright flashing led's would stop me sleeping, but it does have a very small saving in energy costs, but it is a personal choice.

If the hub is used for telephone, door bells etc then it would not be practical to switch the hub off.

If the hub is switched off at night some updates can be missed both for the hub and also the VM tv box (which I also switch off at night), this can affect the performance of equipment and I often do a manual update on my V6 tv box if It misses a network update then I select connect to virgin to update, but it will auto update a few times each day anyway. Missing a V6 update does not prevent the V6 from working, but can affect the programme guide but I rarely have any issues.

I admit I did used to have a lot of VM hub problems so I switched  the hub 3  to  modem mode and bought my own router which works well all the time even after switch off, I switch the hub on first and when the Hub led goes red I switch on my own router.

The VM equipment is designed for 27/7 operation, but switching off/unplugging for short periods in some cases is sensible, eg-if on holiday for example to reduce fire risk.

The VM hub will probably update each time it is rebooted, that is why the green led's flash for a few minutes, but then connects quickly to equipment/devices usually.

Other providers may be different, the older ADLS copper wire broadband which has low speed compared to fibre cable , may need a longer period to start working after power off/on and take a long period to stabilise.?

Other alternatives such as mobile broadband on the move must be designed to work quickly on 4g or 5g. using sim card connection without using a modem. modem.

On balance it is probably sensible to leave the hub switched on 24/7, which it is designed for, but if it is switched off for any reason it will continue to function when switched back on (after a few minutes)