The short answer
Yes, and it’s one of the most common causes of packet loss in home networks. Your router sits at the centre of everything, handling every packet that goes in or out of your house, and when it struggles, everything connected to it suffers. The frustrating part is that a failing router rarely fails dramatically. It usually just starts dropping a small percentage of packets quietly, which feels like “the internet is bit slow lately” rather than an obvious fault.
Both the router itself and the way it’s set up can cause loss. Sometimes the hardware is genuinely past its useful life. Sometimes the hardware is fine but the firmware is buggy or the configuration is wrong. And sometimes the router is being asked to do more than it was ever designed for, which is increasingly common as homes add more devices each year.
The ways routers cause loss
Old or underpowered hardware is the biggest culprit. A router from five or six years ago was designed for a household with maybe ten connected devices and a single 1080p stream. A modern home easily has thirty or forty devices when you count phones, laptops, smart TVs, doorbells, speakers, watches, and everything else. When the router’s processor can’t keep up with the volume of packets it’s being asked to handle, it starts dropping them to cope. You won’t see an error message. You’ll just see the connection feel worse over time.
Overheating is a surprisingly common cause. Routers are often shoved into cupboards, behind TVs, or stacked on top of other warm equipment, and they throttle their own performance when they get too hot. A router that works fine in winter but feels terrible in summer is often a thermal problem. Move it somewhere with airflow and the loss frequently disappears.
Outdated firmware causes ongoing low-level loss because manufacturers regularly patch packet handling bugs that the original release shipped with. A router that’s never been updated since you plugged it in three years ago is running software with known issues that have since been fixed. Most modern routers update themselves automatically, but plenty of older ones don’t, and ISP-supplied routers in particular are sometimes locked to old firmware versions.
Bad configuration causes a quieter share of problems. Wrong MTU settings, badly written QoS rules, channel conflicts on Wi-Fi, or too many devices crammed onto the 2.4GHz band can all cause packets to be dropped or corrupted in ways that look identical to a hardware fault. The router is fine, it’s just being asked to do something it can’t do cleanly.
How to tell if your router is the problem
The cleanest test is to plug a laptop directly into your modem with an ethernet cable, bypassing the router entirely, and run a ping test from there. If the loss disappears, the router is the issue. If the loss is still there, the problem is further upstream and your router is innocent. This only works if you have a separate modem and router, which is increasingly rare in home setups, but if you do it’s the most definitive test you can run.
If you can’t bypass the router, the next best test is to compare a wired connection to the router with a Wi-Fi connection. If wired is clean but Wi-Fi is losing packets, the router’s wireless side is the problem, often interference or signal weakness rather than the router itself. If both wired and Wi-Fi show the same loss, the router as a whole is struggling or the loss is happening beyond it on your ISP’s network.
The fixes follow the diagnosis. A reboot clears temporary issues and applies pending updates. Moving the router to a cooler, more open spot fixes thermal problems. Updating firmware fixes software bugs. Replacing the router fixes hardware that’s simply past its prime. If your router is more than five years old and you’re seeing persistent loss, a new mid-range unit will often fix problems that no amount of configuration can solve on the old one.