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!