Hi everyone, 

I've seen some similar posts here on the forums, so I apologize for making yet another. But, I've tried a few of the fixes I've found here to no avail, so I thought I would make a post to see if anyone could tell me what is going on. I'll tell you a bit about what I've tried and what my ISP has told me to see if anyone has any solution.

For about 48 hours, my Archer A7 semi-randomly loses its connection to my ISP. I say "semi-randomly" because it consistently does it between every 4-5 hours. I can't get an exact fix because I'm usually not using the internet right at the time it fails (or noticing that it has failed) but it is definitely between 4-5 hours after the last router reboot or manual release and renewal of the Dynamic IP. 

After dealing with this several times during the workday Friday, I called my ISP to get some help the next day. Just in case maybe it was a modem problem. However, it wasn't, and they confirmed that the last time my router had asked for a new lease had been earlier that morning, and that it definitely should have asked for one a couple more times since then, but it did not. My ISP could see some data and determined that it looked like the router was not picking up a new IP lease when it should, thus determining that I had no internet access. Again, a manual reboot of the router or my manual releasing of the IP fixes this issue, until the next interval 4-5 hours later. 

Based on talking with my ISP and some of the fixes here, we decided I should change the lease time from the default to something else. I shortened it to an hour, but this didn't help. I wondered if perhaps the router was having trouble renewing the IP after a certain number of successful renewals, so I then set the timer to the ludicrously low number of 6 minutes, wondering if perhaps it would fail to renew after a few tries/minutes instead of the usual 4-5 hours. This didn't help either. Which, given my limited understanding leads me to believe that the router has no problem releasing and renewing the IP as many times at it wants for the given lease time. It always stops doing it at the 4-5 hour mark regardless of how often it needs to perform the renewal. 

I suppose it could be faulty, but it is only a few months old, and it is odd that it is perfectly capable of doing its job for several hours after a reboot or manual release. 

A few other things:

I didn't change any settings recently prior to this problem starting. In fact, haven't needed to do anything to it since getting it until now. 

It did need a firmware update, which I did, though this did not help. I also reset the network again completely and set it up again. This also didn't help. I read some threads where some people felt that rolling back the firmware solved their issue, but mine was occurring before I updated the firmware. This is the first time I updated the firmware since I got the router.

Got a new cable for the connection between the router and modem just in case a physical connection was faulty, also no help. 

I have not changed the lease time to a much longer time than the default, yet, but based on the fact that it doesn't seem to care when the lease is up, only when the 4-hour mark has passed, I am not sure this would do anything.

With no problems for the modem, either, I'm at a loss as to what to do. It could be I need to replace the router, but since I use the internet for work, I wanted to try every possible thing first.

I do plan to report back to my ISP next week, but I also wanted to check here to see if anyone else had any ideas. 

Thank you for reading.

EDIT: I've also found out that, although manually releasing and renewing the DHCP fixes the problem for about 5 hours, doing this in the middle of the previous reset does not extend the "timer". For example, if the router fails to release and renew at 6p.m., and I decide to release and renew at 8p.m., it will still fail to release the IP at around 11p.m., 5ish hours from the last time it failed to do so, even if I did a manual release and renew in between then. It is as though the router feels it must wait that alloted time before it decides to not release and renew.