Broadband customer [piggy in the middle] Any help please.

Hi, I am writing for a friend who is having major probs with his broadband.
On Friday [20/08/10] evening the broadband was lost without reason. On Saturday he contacted Newnet - his ISP; making five calls and was promised call backs three times. No call backs were received. I emailed them and a call back was received but the call was dropped mid way through.
As we have had problems with Broadband at this address in July when the service was lost for FOUR DAYS but which reconnected without explanation, we have now got the bit between our teeth. See my previous posts.
The router is a Belkin F5D7632-4 vers. 7000 [for those that are interested]. Having tried to connect by wire to the BT faceplate direct with a Dell Vostro 1700 to no avail, we contacted Belkin and after a prolonged but helpful call re-configured the Belkin and were informed we needed a firmware update. As we had no broadband [!!] we decamped to my place and tried the Belkin here. NO PROBLEM! My PC and Dell worked A1 wireless included. We have downloaded the firmware update here but not applied it yet.
This morning my friend, now back home in Birmingham, had a broadband connection wirelessly through the Belkin for all of fifteen minutes and then lost connection!! Newnet have requested that the line be tested by our phone provider and changing the filter has made the phone a bit louder. We have now replaced all the wires and filters. BT are obviously testing things as BT wholesale messages have appeared on the PC and the phone lost its dialing tone temporarily.
He is at this moment in conversation with Belkin trying to get the Router updated.
Can anyone out there tell me what is going on??? If an Exchange has been updated would this cause your router to fail without a firmware update?
Belkin have just done a ping test and 1st test 4 out of 4 packets was lost; 2nd test 3 out of 4 packets lost.
Any [helpful] comments much appreciated.

Can you reveal the exchange? See http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_search

It may help see if the problem is exchange related or not.

Yes the problem is with Kings Norton

Mine is a basic rural exchange.

Can't help with your problem. If it's the local line from house to exchange you are stuffed. If you reckon the fault lies within BT/Newnet then I'd change ISP to O2/Be LLU.

If the router works at another house, then I'd leave that well alone, the Belkin upgrade is them just going through various support scripts

More salient information, would be what the router status pages say about the ADSL signal?

i.e. can it sync, but not authenticate, i.e. line connection speed, attenuation, noise margin numbers in the web status.

If an Exchange has been updated would this cause your router to fail without a firmware update? rare enough to say no with 99.9% certainty