Repeated short disconnections usually come from one of four things: a marginal signal, a busy or shared channel, a radio being made to change channel by regulation, or power saving on the device. Which one it is can be narrowed down without buying anything.
Work through it in order of what costs nothing, and stop when the drops stop.
First: is it everything, or one device?
Everything at once points at the router, the line, or something affecting the whole area — a channel change, a firmware fault, interference, a power problem.
One device only points at that device: its radio, its drivers, its power saving, or where it usually sits.
Everything in one room points at coverage in that room rather than at the network.
This single question removes most of the possibilities, and it costs a minute of watching.
Marginal signal
A device at the edge of coverage does not fail cleanly. It holds on, retries, drops, reconnects and holds on again, which is exactly the pattern that gets described as dropping every few minutes.
Move the device closer temporarily. If the drops stop, the problem is coverage, and the answer is a second radio on the far side of whatever is in the way rather than a bigger router.
A busy or shared channel
In a block of flats the 2.4 GHz band is shared with every neighbour, and it has only three non-overlapping 20 MHz channels. A router set to choose automatically may also be moving between them.
Try fixing the channel manually to one of the three and watching. In the 5 GHz band, the equivalent situation is a radio using part of the band that is shared with radar: the unit must move away when it detects some, and it drops its clients while it does. Restricting the radio to the channels not subject to that is the remedy, and the router names them in its own settings.
Power saving on the device
Laptops and phones reduce their radio activity when idle, and some implementations are aggressive enough that a session is dropped rather than paused. This shows up as a device that is fine while in use and disconnected whenever you come back to it.
The setting is on the device, in its power or adapter options, not on the router.
Interference in bursts
A microwave oven sits in the 2.4 GHz band and is a genuine cause of drops that last exactly as long as somebody is heating something. Some cordless equipment and video senders do the same.
If the drops correlate with an activity in the house rather than with the clock, this is where to look.
Firmware and hardware
Check for a firmware update on the router, and check that the model still receives them.
Then check the dull physical things: the router’s power supply, the lead from the line, and whether the unit is somewhere that gets warm. A router that is overheating misbehaves intermittently and gives no obvious sign of why.
What to do if none of it helps
Note when the drops happen and what else is happening. Most routers keep a log, and the timestamps in it turn a vague complaint into a pattern — which is the point at which the cause is usually obvious.
The questions that come up before an order
Why would a channel change on its own?
Parts of the 5 GHz band are shared with radar, and equipment using them has to listen for it and move away when it is detected. A unit that changes channel drops its clients briefly while it does so. Where this happens repeatedly, restricting the radio to channels that are not shared is the usual remedy, and the router’s own settings name them.
Only one device drops. Is that still the network?
Probably not. When everything else stays connected, the interesting differences are that device’s own radio, its power-saving settings and its drivers. A device that drops only when idle is almost always saving power, and that is set on the device rather than on the router.
Last reviewed 10 September 2026