Working from the lake place, my laptop developed a rhythm: roughly every five minutes, the internet vanished for about thirty seconds. Long enough to kill a video call, short enough that by the time you’ve opened anything diagnostic, it’s back and everything looks fine. The most annoying class of problem — intermittent, self-healing, gone when observed.
38 disconnects in five hours
So I stopped observing casually and pulled the access point controller’s logs for the morning. 38 hard disconnects in 5 hours. Every single one on the same access point, on the same channel, at the same weak signal level. And every one followed, five to forty seconds later, by a reconnect — to the same access point. The laptop wasn’t roaming to better coverage. It was drowning, resurfacing, and swimming back to the same spot.
Catching one live
Then I got lucky and caught one live. I had three parallel pings running: the router, the network switch, and a public DNS server on the internet. At 10:15:21 all three died simultaneously. Six seconds later the laptop declared it had no route to anything. Twelve seconds after that, all three came back at once, and the controller logged a matching disconnect/reconnect pair. When the router, the switch, and the internet all vanish in the same instant, the problem isn’t any of them — the WiFi link itself collapsed. Everything above it just fell together.
Meanwhile, a Raspberry Pi sitting wired into the same network had been pinging the internet all session: 695 replies out of 695 pings. Zero gaps. The internet connection never blinked once. Whatever the ISP had done to earn my suspicion, this time it wasn’t them.
The one bad chair
The actual story was in the signal numbers. My desk sits at the far edge of the nearest access point’s coverage — weak enough that the link periodically just collapses, forcing a full reconnection. And the laptop can’t escape to the other access point, because from that exact desk the alternative is even weaker. So it drops, rescans the neighborhood, finds the same marginal option it just left, and rejoins it. Forever. Every phone and tablet in the house was fine; they either roam happily or sleep through it. The laptop was the only device pinned to the one bad chair in the building.
I did the diligence on the fancier suspects — new WAN hardware, firmware, band steering, power-save settings, some scheduled job on the laptop firing every five minutes. All exonerated. The intervals weren’t even regular; they just averaged out to five minutes, the way random failures at a marginal signal do. There was no gremlin. There was geometry.
Move the desk
The fix list, in order of engineering sophistication: move the access point closer to the desk, add a third one, or — the free option — move the desk. All those years of networking knowledge, all that log archaeology, and the root cause analysis ends where every cottage argument ends: the furniture is in the wrong place.