Good evening everyone.  This is a Public Service Announcement for those of you out there using the various models of Asus router for your Spark (or Skinny, or Bigpipe) Fibre Broadband connection.  If you know someone who has one of these devices, please help them out here!

While Spark's network will happily support any router you wish to use (so long as it supports the minimum feature set - see https://www.spark.co.nz/help/internet/set-up/broadband-settings-for-third-party-modems.html) Spark does not provide helpdesk support for non-Spark routers, and this post is about an unofficial as it gets.

One of the default settings in these Asus routers is likely degrading the time it takes for your internet connection to resume following any service interruption (e.g. you restart your router, there is a power cut, a broadband outage in your area etc).  The setting can be found under the WAN settings and it is this one:

Please go into your Advanced WAN settings and set that to "No".  Some older Asus routers do not have this option, but nevertheless it is still on (sadly).  If you do not see this in your settings it might be a good idea to see if there is a newer firmware for your router.  I understand for some very old Asus routers there will not be a version of firmware that allows you to change this setting.

What does this setting do, and why does that cause issues?

This setting causes the router to constantly send DHCP requests to our network (in addition to the PPP that Spark supports).  While that in itself is not a major issue, the side effect is that the constant connection failures that this causes result in any new connection attempts being ignored for up to 5 minutes.  That won't bite you .... until the next time your connection restarts ... and then if the next connection attempt is DHCP, we'll ignore the router (including any PPP attempts) for another 5 minutes.  And this repeats and repeats until at the end of any 5 minute period of being ignored the router sends a PPP request, and your connection comes up again.  But your interent might have been down for anywhere between a few minutes and several hours (if you're very unlucky).  This is time your internet connection is not working when it could have been.

Why is this setting there?

I am not sure.  I have heard rumours relating to a country across the other side of the world and how their connections need to be set up.  For whatever reason it is there, it makes your connection in NZ worse, and I recommend that it should be disabled.