Greetings, and I hope that the holiday season is finding you and your loved ones staying safe and healthy.
As you may already be aware, the approaching winter storm is bringing with it a high probability of strong winds, heavy rain, and thunderstorms. These have the potential to cause power outages that could impact your Internet, TV, and phone service.
If your home does lose power, it is likely that your internet service may also be lost. However, it is also important to note the possibility that you may lose your internet service, but not your power. In this scenario, your home Wi-Fi signal will remain on, but the internet will not be reachable. This may not be immediately apparent, but here are a couple of ways to check:
1. If your power is on, but you find that you cannot browse the web, or use email, or stream video on your TV (such as Netflix, Disney+ or Prime Video), the first thing that you can check is that the Wi-Fi signal on your phone, tablet, or computer is active. This is the icon that shows your phone's Wi-Fi signal is connected:
And, here are examples of iPhone status bars which show that the Wi-Fi signal is active:
If you see this on your phone, but you cannot reach the internet, that means you have probably lost the internet signal coming into the home from your internet provider (Optimum, Xfinity, Frontier, etc).
2. The other way to check is to go to where your cable modem and wifi router are located, and verify that the power is on. If the lights are on, then this also means that your Wi-Fi signal is working, but that the internet signal is not coming into your home.
3. For those customers who have an Orbi Wi-Fi system, you can also check your internet signal by looking at the Orbi app on your phone. If the internet is out, the dashboard will show you this:
(Note: other Wi-Fi apps, such as the Linksys Velop, will also show you a similar message if your internet connection is down)
Hopefully, your power and internet will not be affected by the storm, but in the event that it is, I hope that this information comes in handy.
We wish you and your families a happy and healthy holiday season!