Wake on lan only works close to home

I have Teamviewer on my desktop at home. I have the Teamviewer app on my Android phone. I have WOL setup.

Here's the deal; my phone can wake up my desktop:

  1. at home, connected to wifi
  2. at home, not connected to wifi, mobile data only

But when I got to work this morning, took out my phone, and tried to wake up my desktop... nothing. When I got home, as stated above, it worked fine; was able to wake the desktop either connected to wifi or on mobile data only. HOWEVER...

I then disconnected my phone from the wifi, got in my car, and drove about a half a mile away... and was able to wake the desktop.

But at work (about 20 miles from home) this morning, I couldn't.

Anyone have any ideas, here? When it didn't work at work this morning I thought I needed to adjust my settings or something when I got home, but now I don't know what to think.

I thought about just driving further and further away to see if it stopped working at a certain distance from home, but I thought I'd ask for ideas here, first.

Tl;dr WOL via smartphone works at home and a half mile from home, but not at work.

P.S. I followed this video to set up WOL initially.

Comments

  • Scotty
    Scotty Posts: 493 Staff member 🤠

    Hi @addiemcbaddie

    WOL is not related to distance at all. I understand that it may look this way, but I guarantee it is not the case.

    Can you give more information about the setup?
    a) Are you waking the device via another TeamViewer device inside the same LAN?
    b) are you waking via Public IP?

    Can you confirm if you are waking via public IP that you have set up port forwarding etc?

    Just note that when waking a device using Public IP, TeamViewer is just taking the action of sending the magic packet. The software on the device does not configure anything else for you and the troubleshooting is the same as standard WOL.

    -Scotty

    Senior Moderator
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