Router problem or not...?

I am posting on behalf of my Dad who uses Sky. The other day he was on-line and it suddenly cut off. Since then (about a week ago) he can only get on-line now and then for about 10 minutes. I checked a few obvious things like cables, rebooted everything but still nothing.

The link light is on on the router but I can't ping a website or the router. I can ping 127.0.0.1 so I guess my NIC is working ok. There are no indications in the event long on the PC that there is a hardware problem with the NIC. I think I can point the problem at the router. The router is a Sagem one.

Any suggestions? If it is possibly how does my Dad go about getting a new one to test it?

Thanks.

Ring sky and tell them the router has blown up and ask for a new one.

Or if you have a spare router, get the username and password from here (if the site still works) http://www.cm9.net/skypass/

Ping 127.0.0.1 is not guaranteed to prove the network card is working (it probably is though). If you want to make sure then ping the router (probably 192.168.0.1). That will test the PCs network card and the router network port. If that works then log in to the router interface and check to see if t is connected to the network - it might be that it is seeing an ADSL link (hence the light) but not logging in for some reason.