Why do we have to wait 10 seconds when you restart your WIFI router?
In: Technology
In the circuit boards there are capacitors.
They function like short term rechargeable batteries.
To make sure all systems are truly off you have to wait for them to deplete.
An ISP I called once told me to wait for 10 minutes to make sure everything is ‘all right’.
Looks like I only had to wait for mere 10 seconds?!
Also, because your session (with the device in the internet providers) is kept open by time. So if you quickly turn off and on again, it’s possible it hasn’t realised you’ve gone offline.
By leaving it off for 10 seconds or more, it usually gives it enough time to realise nothings communicating and to kill the session.
Realistically you should turn it off for much longer, but it usually does the trick
Source: this was my job to fix these for 2+ years
All the swirly, whirly, buzzy things in the box need to stop completely and that takes a few seconds, even with no power.
Imagine a sink.
When you turn the tap on it starts to fill up.
The plug is set to open for 1 second every 5 seconds.
It’s the water coming from the plug hole that powers the device. Not the power coming from the tap.
So you can turn the tap off, and there still be water in the sink, so when the plug opens water comes out and powers the device.
You have to wait sometime after closing the tap for all the water in the sink to be used.
A WiFi router is actually a small computer. It has a CPU, RAM, and other similar components inside of it. This is because a Router is not merely a transmitter of a signal, instead it actively manages every single device that is connected to it via WiFi, every request sent to it, and it manages the data flow that happens over the WiFi connection with each device.
By turning off your router and giving it a couple of seconds, you essentially give it the chance to properly clear out any memory stores from it’s previous active sessions – essentially allowing it to start out fresh and ready for new action once you turn it back on.
10 seconds is suggested simply as a good practice, but in reality just a couple of seconds is enough to achieve this in most cases.
You don’t have to wait 10 seconds to restart your router. This is an urban legend. Back in the day (20+ years ago) some routers would not immediately respond to the reset button being pressed. This was a software/firmware issue, not a result of capacitors failing to self discharge.
I did tech support for an internet provider for seven years. We told people to leave the router unplugged for ten seconds for the same reason we told the to ‘swap ends’ on the network cable – because if we didn’t, people would lie and just say they did it.
I work for a national ISP in the US.
Your box won’t completely forget the connection it had for those first few seconds it’s off, meaning it might not have to start from scratch when you start it back up. If it doesn’t start from scratch, it might not get rid of whatever is causing your problem.
That’s the official Eli5 that I give to the boomers when they complain about having to wait 15 seconds.
The other comments mentioning capacitors and the like are kinda Eli10 imo
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