Faulty Modem?

Looking for a 2nd opinion here.

Friend has Sky Broadband, service activated, Netgear-a-like wireless modem router arrived and setup. Can't get any internet. Sky Tech support blamed viruses, then blamed PC manufacturer. Great.
All lights are showing on the front panel of the router-modem, which indicate there is an active internet connection. They have a single PC which connects to the modemrouter via a LAN cable. I am able to ping the router with success, all attempts at opening the homepage of the router at 192.168.0.1 time out. Firewall and AV software switched off as per instructions, still no luck. LAN is showing as connected in Network connections on the PC.
At this point Sky gets the "durr" award for the setup procedure of this modem - you are prompted to update to IE7, and when that fails, setup cannot continue. You are also told to go online for any help. Again, durrr....
So is it a faulty modem/router? I've managed to call Tech Support back, and they've now realised that "maybe" the modemrouter is faulty and will send out a new one, but I'm a bit annoyed at them for fobbing off my friend, giving them the runaround for 3 days.

>Looking for a 2nd opinion here.

Not a good start I must say. Unfortunately most help desks start from the basis that a problem is a customer error, so you get the run around (the fault finding routine) until they wise up if it turns out not to be the case.

As you cannot access the router on an ethernet connection it does point to a faulty router but the only way you can conclusively prove that is to try a replacement.

Let's hope that fixes the problem.

Have you checked the settings in IE?

Go into Tools - Internet Options - Connections

Check that "never dial a connection" is selected. Go into LAN settings and make sure there are no ticks in any of the boxes.

Click OK to backout of each of the dialogue boxes and see if you can connect to the routers address then.

Hi Ian, Thank you for that info, I have tried that already, thanks anyway.

In reply to:

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..... As you cannot access the router on an ethernet connection it does point to a faulty router .....

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Not necessarily. A screwed-up MTU setting could produce exactly these symptoms. I would be inclined to try the router on another PC.

Does sound faulty to me, although if you have another PC test it on that

fawlty network setup
what is the pc ip address and subnet
is this win xp

Not sure what you mean by the term "faulty set up"...
PC IP is the 192.168.0.2, subnet is 255.255.255.0, and yes it is XP.
I think its clear that the router is faulty as I've tried everything, awaiting now for replacement. Thanks to everyone for your help.

no-ones mentioned this yet but is the network connection set to DHCP?

ip should be in the 192.168.0.x range
subnet should be 255.255.255.0
and the gateway should be 192.168.0.1 (the router)

got start -> run then type cmd and hit enter. when the dos box comes up type ipconfig

Would you know, Sky wasn't at fault here, but some strange validation problem with Windows. A reformat sorted it out and all is well now. Thanks for all your replies. Apologies to Sky, I guess they were right all along!

Edited by deleted (Sat 25-Aug-07 23:51:06)