ADSL woe

[chrisvenus]

Woe is me for I have no internet!

Friday evening (yes, five days ago now) our ADSL apparently packed up. I've spent time poking it, mostly on Monday. I haven't got the diagnostic report to hand but roughly speaking it seems that it gets as far as doing all the ATM stuff and then failing while trying to establish a PPP connection. I optimistically thought that our ISP (freedom2surf) might have tech support able to help me identify the problem. Hahahaha...

After an hour on hold I ifinally got through to somebody. The extent of his skills was "could you try to reboot it" (tried four times at least) "Could you ping these addresses" (yes, but as I've already told you that the ADSL has no external IP address getting me to ping goolge is likely to yield the same "network unreachable I've alreayd told you about". And finally resetting all the settings.

Needless to say it didn't do any good. "Can you confirm that it is making the ATM connection at least and can you tell me if it is even trying to establish a PPP link?" "I can't ping your computer..."

So, I got bored of that. They were going to run a line test and phone me back. That was meant to be yesterday. I have heard nothing from them. I'm not goign to bother phoning them up again. I may create an e-ticket from work where I have net and ask them what the status is. What I am more likely to do is just bite the bullet and buy a new ADSL modem and see if that works. Unless somebody has a spare they aren't using?

I might see if our little cisco piece of crap we have sitting around work is still sitting around and take that home tonight to do some line tests. Given the trouble I had with that one before though I am worried it won't help as I won't be able to configure it. :)

So, if I buy one ha anybody got reccomendations? I have separate wireless thing already so I don't really need one of those. On the other hand I have no problem consolidating if that is what the reccomendation is.

Also I am now extremely tempted to stop being cheap and go to somebody like http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/ for my ADSL since they cost a bit more than I am paying currently but I know that if I have a problem they will at least talk to me without putting me on hold for an hour and that if they say they will call me back they probably will. Cheap is always great until it goes wrong...

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Did you end up on Sky or NTL in the end, for your videoitic needs?

I ask because Sky are introducing cheap broadband.

http://broadband.sky.com/whatdoesitcost.htm

[danfossydan.livejournal.com]

That is why I use Demon. They have some kind of technical support, that actually are able to help. (when you can get though to them these days...)

[chaosdeathfish.livejournal.com]

I'm on Demon, but when I tried to get tech support (when my ADSL refused to work at all when I first ordered it) I ended up talking to a call centre in India. I'm not that impressed with them any more, to be honest.

[chaosdeathfish.livejournal.com]

I have a crappy little USB ADSL model, if you want to borrow it?

[hendybear.livejournal.com]

I have a spare Netgear DG834G which you are welcome to borrow for diagnostic purposes, however I won't be back till Friday evening.

My only word of advise having just been down the try a few routers line, is that cheaper is sometimes better, my old cheap router works just fine the new shinny netgear router has so much in built security that it can be a bugger to configure, especially if you use VPN.

[danfossydan.livejournal.com]

Yeah - thats a recent 'inovation' for them.

I've found that they still have the power to fix things, and look up data that other tech support people can't, which has helped solve a few problems for me.

Also I use there text chat thing on there website quite often - which has been fast and useful, and given that its text chat - I really can't tell where they are in the world.

Of course this only helps if you ahve a working internet connection. But I've got about 10 demon adsl accounts...

[chrisvenus]

I'll try the work cisco first. Its an evil thing but then so is USB ADSL. :)

[chrisvenus]

Yeah. The problem with the cisco is its very expensive and therefore rubbish. :) It has built in firewalls, VPN, blah and blah and it'll be one of these bits that causes it all to not work as I want. Should be sufficient to test with one computer physically wired into it though...

[smallbluesphere.livejournal.com]

I'm with BT, I don't have many tech problems, but when I do it's off to the call center in India, which is just more pain than it's worth *sigh*, but I'm generally pretty happy with the service.

To get decent tech supp, you generally have to go to the smaller providers, many of who are starting to make a thing about using UK support staff as they know people age going mad about the Indian ones.

[zandev.livejournal.com]

Similarly, I think I've got a crappy USB ADSL modem lying around.

[huggyrei.livejournal.com]

I got my router from ebuyer - never had any problems with it. Not sure how the prices and spec compare with anywhere else.

I *was* happy with Plus.net, but they're actually trying to screw me over now I'm trying to cancel so am no longer happy.