Orange random disconnection nightmare

I'm currently having a serious problem with my connection where the line drops randomly for seemingly random periods of time whenever it chooses. It started happening on Sunday morning and has been going on ever since. I've tried calling Orange technical support but the Indian on the other end of the phone seemed to have little understanding of my problem and insisted on reading out a sheet of router settings to me (which happened to be exactly the same as the ones I currently use which have been fine for the last year). I've also tried an online BT line test, which revealed no problems. I use a Belkin wireless router and am subscribed to the old Wanadoo Broadband package at 1mbps. Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be or how I might go about solving it, or maybe where I could go or who I could talk to to get the help I need?

Just to clarify, the periods of connection and disconnection are seemingly random in length and occur at apparently random intervals. When the connection is up, there are no problems with its speed or anything.

I get this issue from time to time. I've got a Livebox, one of the originals. Everything has been fine for the last couple of weeks but I went through a couple of month period of disconnects, as you say, at random times and for random periods of time.
Rang Orange and eventually got through to some fella up north, he told me to ensure I had a micro filter on every BT socket. I had one socket not filtered. Thinking about it now I don't think I've had any problems since.
I had the same experience of the "Helpdesk" as you, made me reset the router then put the same settings back in.

Good luck

what does the router do lights wise when you're offline. What lights does it have when it working right?

If it has a flashing sync or ADSL light check out the filter setup as Jetski suggests.

When it's working fine, both the 'can I connect' and 'am I connected' lights are on solid. When it's not working, the 'am I connected' light will go off and the 'can I connect' light will either be solid off or be flashing (it will switch from solid to flashing at seemingly random intervals).

I too would have suspected the filters but neither I nor anybody else has done anything to them or any of the telephones in the house for at least the last two months, and until two days ago everything was working fine.

Edited by greycat (Tue 03-Jul-07 00:14:21)

I had this problem recently, the noise would randomly rocket up on my line causing it to disconnect momentarily and take about 2-5 minutes to reconnect. Eventually i noticed that it happed every time it rained (or just after) and may disconnect upto every minute or so (or not at all for hours)all times of the day/night. Dry weather it was fine.

Having spoken to a friend who works for his families ADSL business and explaining my issues, he said BT junction boxes are prone to being less than water tight which can play havoc with ADSL. His advice was to phone orange and ask them to send a BT engineer out.

Driving home a few days later (before I got a chance to phone orange) I saw a BT van parked outside and working on my lanes junction box and now 'touch-wood' the disconnections have stopped.

This may have been purely a coincidence and not at all related.. but it's something for you to look at see if there's any correlation.. especially with the recent weather..