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Ah, the saga continues!

Zyxel responded to me about the changelog. They sent me a changelog from 2005. Swing and a miss there, Zyxel support!

So, are things better? Well, kinda. It was playing up totally Monday, so I spoke to Zen (again). The guy I spoke to said BT had changed my line profile and most changes would take about 24 hours to take affect. Fine I said. I decided to watch some TV, and rather than have various webby services get confused and crash out over a half-there connection, I switched the router off.

Mistake.

I left it off until about 6PM on Tuesday. I powered on, and it ran for about five minutes before falling over and doing the usual old stuff. So I got on the phone to Zen once again. I’m getting bored of the current hold music they have. Some different stuff wouldn’t go amiss guys! Anyway, I spoke to a guy there, explained what I’d done. “You’ve left it switched off?” he said. I replied in the affirmative. “Ahhh! Well!” he says, “who told you to switch it off?” “Nobody,” I said, “but it wasn’t working so I thought I’d switch it off.” He explained that that was a very silly thing to do. Apparently, as BT had changed my line parameters, the line had gone back into it’s training mode, so it needed a modem up at the other end to talk to and learn with. I’d switched it off, so basically I’d lost a day’s worth of ‘re-training’ to get the connection back.

I had a whinge at the guy. I’d not been told I couldn’t, but I’d not been told I could. OK, so it’s mostly my fault (I’m big enough to admit that!), but I was a bit miffed I wasn’t told to just leave it alone. Zen’s support line actually tells you ‘Make sure you have rebooted your router before talking to support’! As ever, the guy I spoke to was very courteous though, and explained everything to me. I could tell he was having a smarty-pants ‘it’s your fault, silly customer!’ moment. God knows I’ve done it enough times. Retribution I suppose.

So I left the router on, and just watched TV again. It’s been on all night and all day. When I got home today it was up, but there was no connection. I cycled the power and it happily connected, and has been working fairly well since. It drops about every hour, but that’s liveable right now. It should get better. The support guy I spoke to said to ring back Thursday evening if it’s still bad. We’ll see!

So, t’internet has been behaving fine since my last rambling whine. The support call has been closed, and all was well.

Until today.

I came home to find the usual story, the connection up and down like a yo-yo, and a pretty much useless connection in general. I contacted Zen, re-opened the call, and now we’re back to BT doing ‘something-or-the-other’.

I got bored though, and decided to try my old Alcatel Speedtouch modem – yes, one of those green ‘frog’ things! I still have it from my old BTOpenworld connection! I plugged it up to my laptop, and found something interesting. It connected at a lower speed than my router, and so it was perfectly stable. The Router was connecting at 3.8Mb, whilst the ‘frog’ was connecting at 2.8Mb. I played around for a while; Sophos did an update, and Windows downloaded a ton of updates. It all stayed up fine. I swapped the cable back to the router – 3.8Mb again. Back to the Speedtouch – 2.8Mb.

‘Odd’ I thought. Something is amiss here. So I took myself along to Zyxel’s site to see if there was a new firmware, and ‘lo, there was! I downloaded and installed it (after much kicking and screaming – it seems the download site doesn’t work too well in Firefox) and the router connected at – 2.4Mb! And it’s been stable since.

Now, I have a sneaky feeling Zyxel have made some tweaks to make it run better on ADSL Max. I could be wrong, but the only other firmware prior to this one was quite old, so I’m pretty certain something has changed. I’ve emailed Zyxel’s support to ask if this is the case, as they don’t publish a changelog on the website. We’ll see!