Wi-Fi that drops every twenty minutes is among the most maddening faults in a house, partly because the obvious fix — restart the router — works sometimes and does nothing other times, with no hint as to why. Going through it in order saves a lot of guessing.
Start with one question: one device, or all of them?
This one distinction wipes out half the possibilities.
If a single laptop or phone drops while everything else holds, the router is almost certainly fine. On Windows, the usual culprit is power management: the OS shuts off the Wi-Fi adapter to save battery, and it does this even when the laptop is plugged into the wall. Open the adapter properties, go to the power management tab, and take away its permission to turn the device off.
If everything drops at once, look at the router, the line into your home, or something in the environment hitting both.
Restart it properly, which isn't how most people do it
Sequence matters. Unplug the modem and the router. Wait 30 seconds to a minute. Plug the modem back in first and let its lights settle — that means it's re-authenticated with your provider. Only then power up the router.
Restarting both together often fails, because the router comes up hunting for an upstream connection that isn't ready. This is the number one reason a restart "didn't work."
Update the firmware
Stale router firmware causes a big share of intermittent disconnects, and it's easy to skip because nothing ever nags you about it. Log into the admin page or the app and check. If your router is more than five years old and no longer gets updates, that's not a step — that's your answer.
Look around the room
Microwaves, Bluetooth gear and even refrigerators interfere with the 2.4GHz band. Placement counts just as much: a router on the floor, in a cabinet or shoved against an exterior wall covers a fraction of what the same unit covers up high and central.
In apartments, channel congestion is the usual suspect — dozens of networks fighting over the same channels. Most routers choose automatically, and they choose badly. Picking a specific, quieter channel in the settings fixes drops that nothing else touches.
Heat is worth a check too. If the disconnects cluster in the afternoon or after the router's been up for weeks, put a hand on it and give it some airflow.
Turn off band merging
Plenty of routers ship with a feature that puts the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands under one network name — TP-Link calls it Smart Connect, other brands use other names. Handy when it works, but some devices handle the handoff badly and disconnect over and over while bouncing between bands.
If drops survive everything above, split the bands into two network names and pin the problem device to one of them. That clears up a surprising number of stubborn cases.
When it isn't your gear
Before you call the provider, run an ethernet cable from a computer straight into the modem and use it for an hour. If the wired connection drops too, the fault is the line coming into your home or the modem, and no amount of router fiddling will fix it.
Do that test first. It turns a vague support call into a specific one, and a documented wired failure is what actually gets a technician sent out or hardware swapped.
Image: Jakub Zerdzicki, via Pexels
