Comment by maccard

> Also, rebooting is offensive to me as a programmer. Kernel updates and memory leaks are the only reason you need to reboot.

This surprises me - as a programmer you should realise that reboots can often help. Cache invalidation is one of the notoriously hard CS problems and an awful lot of systems will start fresh on reboot.

> (Never mind that I personally don't feel like I've ever had a modem/isp actually problem solved by rebooting)

My current ISP is better, but my previous ISP cycled IP addresses at 2am (and lost connectivity for about 30 seconds at the same time) on a Friday night. I would semi-frequently be up playing games at that hour, and it was about 50/50 as to whether devices on my network would survive the blip. Rebooting the router had a 100% success rate.

I currently (unfortunately) have a google wifi mesh system. It works great, except about once a month it reports that absolutely everything is fine, all tests pass from my mobile device, but my laptop has no internet connectivity. Rebooting fixes it just fine.

> How absolutely shitty is modem firmware that the ISP actually spent the time to build this reboot system out?

Firmware is still software, like it or lump it. Modem firmware has been shitty for a long time. A major ISP [0] in the UK had an issue with their firmware that caused massive latency spikes under load. Alsom Power loss happens sometimes. The modem/router has to be able to turn on in the first place, so a "reboot" is just going through that process again. It's attempting to return to a "last known good".

[0] https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Hub-3-Com...