Hi to the forum.
This post is hopefully going to help some people who own Netgear Routers. Specifically our business owns a DGND3300v2 Rangemax router - the firmware is totally up to date. We lost internet some two days ago at about 12.30pm, all the lights on the router were working including the DSL light, apart from the internet light which was red. We could access the router page with no problem. None of our settings have been changed for the last two years since the router was installed. We used the BT update telephone line to find out if there were any problems. The message we got was that BT were upgrading their systems and we could lose internet intermittently. That message is still on their system. We logged the problem with BT who after some tests said there appeared to be a connection issue. An engineer was booked. Note we have a Static IP address.
The engineer arrived today, he was very thorough, however both him and his colleague that he spoke to on the phone decided it was the Netgear Router that was the problem and changed it over to a BT Business Hub 2701HGVC. Everything then worked fine within a few minutes. The engineer left us with the BT Hub. I noticed that the BT hub encapsulation was PPPoA and multiplexing was VC based. Because our Netgear router is still under warranty I had to call that 'problem' into Netgear. That was a real nightmare process and I wouldn't recommend it, our phone based support with them had expired and I ended up after a long lost in translation effort paying £39.99 for a one-off support to look at the problem. Be careful, they do try to sell you a year's worth! After I had parted with that, the support guy at Netgear said they needed to look at the configuration, specifically the encapsulation. Surprise....
The Netgear router had been set to PPPoE and VC based for the last two years and worked fine until now. The support guy asked me to change the encapsulation to PPPoA and VC based on the Netgear router and apply. Within seconds the Netgear router was working fine again. I am posting this because the support at Netgear are apparently receiving a large number of calls from BT customers who are having the same problem. It appears that BT have changed something on PPPoE and haven't properly informed us. I have also logged this issue with BT over the phone as I do not want to end up paying for the BT callout or the Hub they left behind which will now be returned. I generally think of myself as being quite capable when it comes to IT but never thought that I would end up having to re-configure the Netgear router because of something the internet provider had changed (without telling me they had done so). I hope this helps some people.
