What your router’s lights mean (and what to do about them)

Router lights are the closest thing your broadband has to a dashboard — and once you can read them, most “is it me or is it them?” questions answer themselves in seconds. Colours and icons vary between providers and models, but the logic below covers almost every UK hub. For your exact model, your provider’s help pages list the specific colours — worth a two-minute look now, before anything breaks.

The 10-second read

What you see	What it usually means	What to do
Steady/pulsing white, green or blue	Connected — all normal	Nothing. If things are slow anyway, see below
Flashing during startup	Syncing — normal for 5–10 minutes	Wait it out; don’t restart repeatedly
Red or orange internet/broadband light	No connection to your provider	Steps 1–4 below
Power light only, others dark	Router on, no line detected	Check cables/microfilter (step 2)
No lights at all	No power (or LEDs turned off)	Check the socket, power cable and any LED switch
Flashing WPS light	Pairing mode is active	Normal for ~2 minutes after pressing WPS

First: which hub have you actually got?

That table is the general pattern, and on some hubs it is backwards. Work out your model before you act on any colour advice — including ours.

• BT Home Hub 4 and 5 invert the newer BT colours. On these older hubs an orange power light means there is a problem, and a red power light means no broadband at all. On a BT Smart Hub, orange is the ordinary “connecting” or “no internet yet” colour and red is the general fault light. Same brand, opposite meanings — and the Home Hub 4 and 5 also have three separate lights rather than one, so which light has changed matters as much as the colour.
• EE does not use the same colour names as everyone else. On several EE hubs the healthy colour is aqua and the no-internet colour is yellow, where another provider would say blue and orange. If you are looking for an orange light on an EE hub and cannot find one, that is why.
• Plusnet has a colour nobody else documents. A pink light on a Plusnet Hub Two means it has been switched into bridge (modem-only) mode. Advice written for BT hardware will not mention it, because BT does not document it.
• One colour can mean two things on the same hub. A Virgin Media Hub 3 has a flashing green power light and a flashing green Wi-Fi light that mean entirely different things.

The model name is usually printed on a label on the underside or the back, next to the serial number. The per-provider pages below list every state the manufacturer documents, model by model.

The lights, one by one

• Power — steady means on. Flashing usually means the router is booting or updating firmware: leave it alone; pulling the plug mid-update can genuinely break a router.
• Broadband / DSL / sync — on older (non-fibre) connections this shows whether the line to the exchange is synced. Flashing = still trying; steady = synced.
• Internet / globe / @ — the one that matters: whether you’re actually connected to your provider. Red/orange/off = no internet, regardless of what the Wi-Fi light says.
• Wi-Fi / wireless — your home network is broadcasting. It says nothing about the internet connection itself (the difference explained).
• Ethernet/LAN — lights per port; usually only relevant when a wired device stops working (reseat the cable).
• WPS — flashes while the router accepts new devices at the press of the button.

Red or orange light: the fix sequence

1. Restart properly — power off, wait 60 seconds, power on, then give it up to 10 minutes to fully sync. Our restart your router guide covers why the pause matters.
2. Check the physical layer. Broadband cable firmly in the right socket (and undamaged), fibre cable not kinked; on FTTC/ADSL lines, make sure any microfilter is fitted and try a spare if you have one; try the master socket rather than an extension.
3. Check for an outage — use our is my broadband down? checker and your provider’s status page or app. If it’s an area fault, there’s nothing to fix at home; note when it started.
4. Still red after all that? Report the fault to your provider. If the repair drags on, you may be owed automatic compensation — from two full working days after you report a total loss of service.

Lights are green but it’s still slow?

Then the connection is up and the problem is speed or Wi-Fi, not sync. Run a speed test wired if possible, check the figure, then work through fix slow internet — or fix slow Wi-Fi if wired is fine but wireless isn’t.

Three things worth checking before you conclude the line is at fault, because each of them looks exactly like “slow broadband” from the sofa:

• Are you testing it properly? A test run over Wi-Fi, on a busy laptop, to a distant server will under-report badly. How to run an accurate speed test covers what to control for so the number means something.
• Is it only slow in the evening? That is a different problem with different causes, and a mid-afternoon speed test will never show it. See why your internet is slow at night.
• Are you on the wrong Wi-Fi band? If your hub shows separate 2.4GHz and 5GHz lights — Community Fibre’s Nokia router labels them WLAN 2.4 and WLAN 5 — it is worth knowing which one your devices are using and why it matters: 2.4GHz vs 5GHz Wi-Fi.

Your exact hub, colour by colour

The colours above are the general pattern, but every provider uses its own scheme and they differ between hub generations — so the same colour can mean two different things on two hubs from the same provider. These pages list every light state the manufacturer documents, per model, with the official source for each:

• BT hub lights — Smart Hub 2, Smart Hub 3, Smart Hub and Ultrafast Smart Hub, Home Hub 4 and 5
• Virgin Media hub lights — Hub 3, Hub 4, Hub 5
• Sky router lights — Sky Broadband Hub, Sky Q Hub, Sky Hub, Sky Max Hub, Gigafast+ Hub
• EE hub lights — Smart Hub (2023 and 2021), Smart Hub 6 Plus, 7 Plus, 7 Pro, Smart Router
• TalkTalk router lights — orange, white, and the 15-minute rule TalkTalk publishes
• Plusnet Hub Two lights — blue, green, orange, red and the pink bridge-mode light
• NOW Broadband Hub lights — three greens, and why an amber light can mean an unpaid bill
• Community Fibre router lights — all eleven lights on the Nokia box, including the two you can ignore

We only list a light meaning if we can read it as text on the provider’s own site. For Vodafone, Three, Gigaclear, Hyperoptic and Starlink we could not: their light guidance is published as images inside interactive panels, or built by scripts that leave nothing readable in the page itself, or not published at all. So those hubs are missing here, and that is deliberate — we would rather tell you we do not know than guess and send you to reset a working router. Never apply one provider’s colours to another provider’s box; the same colour genuinely means different things on different hardware.

On a full fibre line there is a second box, and it fails independently of your hub: what the lights on the white Openreach box mean covers the PON, LOS and port lights, and the Digital Voice adapter. If the connection is down altogether, work through what to do when your broadband is down.

→ Use the is my broadband down? checker