Absolutely. Its jacket is damaged which means it can now be compromised by moisture which alters the signal properties of the cable. Also looks like it was kinked tightly which can damage it.

That is a switch…look closely it requires power and has lights on it. Its just a 3-port wired gigabit network switch.

Nah look closer - its a switch. USB power supply and normal switch LED indicators on the ports.

Idk why they are marketing it as a “splitter” making it sound inferior…that should make for more painful searches next time I need an actual splitter. Which can be handy for like 2x PoE cameras over 1 existing drop…and even 4K cameras will never saturate 100Mbps so its fine.

I’d avoid your ISP DNS for almost any other option. I’ve had multiple ISPs that redirect unregistered domains to their own site or search pages, and/or marketing pages, or decide that some sites or content should be limited for no real reason.

At least the big public ones (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9, etc) have less reason to misdirect your results.

I now run my own DNS resolver, which also can cache results on my LAN for improved speed, and then query upstream to Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 or Google 8.8.8.8 as needed. I’ve been quite happy with that.

A million times better!

Cable modem or all-in-one modem+router?

Cable modems are configured by your ISP and you will have to call (or some can do online) them to have it provisioned, and then they will remove the old one and configure the new one with whatever you pay for.

If you mean the router LAN configuration, that would depend if your old one has a way to export the new one understands. Probably not with consumer hardware.

Maybe.

I have UPSs on my home gear and a generator, but out of the last 2 places I’ve lived…one had about 4 hours of battery backup on the ISP equipment along the roads, the other seems to have zero backup power (and sent out an email point blank saying if power is out in the area expect internet to go out even if your house still has power)

Would changing the study location be an easy solution? Say doing studies at the kitchen table or similar where its easy to keep an eye on in-person while doing other chores around the house?

When it comes up and isn’t working, does the Deco have an IP address from the gateway? How long have you waited to see (minutes, hours?) if it retries again?

This sounds like some kind of bug where the Deco is timing out and then never retries getting a DHCP address.

If the outages are short, a UPS would help keep them from going down in the first place. If they are longer some more complex logic to delay startup might be required if you TPLink doesn’t offer any firmware updates to fix the issue. A crude workaround could be a daily reboot with a lamp timer that simply shuts off the Deco at midnight for a few minutes and turns it back on…at least it would eventually restart that way.