Change from the official Sky router ?

I have a Netgear DG834GT router spare and I was wondering whether it would offer a more stable connection with Sky broadband than using it's own router as I am plagued with disconnections and not only in the evenings (when the SNR margin drops) but through the day as well.

I know I have a long line (54 dB) but when I was with O2 (before migrating to Sky) I never had any trouble using the Netgear router and I was able to get a higher sync both upstream and downstream back then.

Any advice would be most welcome.

p.s. I have 2 Sky routers as I rang them up and complained about my router dropping all the time and so they sent me a slightly older model.

It doesn't matter whether I use the router with the 2012 or the 2011 firmware, it still drops

Have you got your username and password?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Have you got your username and password?

Yeah I can get into the router stats page.

I know the cause of the problem, my downstream SNR margin drops to around 3 dB and the connection drops.

This hardly used to happen before.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Have you got your username and password?

Just thought, I am using the default 'Sky' and 'admin' passwords

Should I change them for enhanced security ?

I changed mine when I discovered my router admin page was available on the web, but I had been messing about and switched the firewall off

Think they mean the username and password for the connection not the router interface. There are websites that will generate it for most but I am not sure if they work for 100% of connections.

In reply to a post by ian72:

Think they mean the username and password for the connection not the router interface. There are websites that will generate it for most but I am not sure if they work for 100% of connections.

They work for any line that still works with PPPoA but not with any line that is MER only - although I read that MER is being reserved for fibre users, most ADSL users are on PPPoA now.

http://www.cm9.net/skypass/

The Asus 55u router I have for review had profiles for Sky, but both failed to work.

Then looked at settings in the Sky modem and it was just pppoa 0/38 VCMux, but did need to clone the WAN MAC address too.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The Asus 55u router I have for review had profiles for Sky, but both failed to work.

Then looked at settings in the Sky modem and it was just pppoa 0/38 VCMux, but did need to clone the WAN MAC address too.

Interesting. To use PPPoA you just need your ID/password extracted/generated from a sky router and feed those into any router with 0/38 VCmux set.

To use MER you need a special modified DHCP client which issues the userid & password request in the client-ID field (DHCP option 61) which the majority of routers don't have support for in their user interface. You set the router into IPoA mode (RFC something) similar to O2/BE. Some netgears can be telnetted in and issue the dhcp command manually.

SkyUser forum has more on this - and its how Billion and Draytek have issued beta firmware's for Sky users on MER.