PPP killed by a faulty RJ-11 cable?

Came home yesterday to find the sync light on my router flashing away (Billion 8800NL)

Rebooted it and momentarily regained sync and it logged in, then dropped, resynced etc.

Rang Zen who told me it had been down since about midday and they were seeing sync, auth, drop every couple of minutes since the reboot.

Swapped the router for my backup Netgear DGND3300, connected to the test socket and replaced the filter for a spare ADSL Nation/Tandy one (I have two of these)

Got a stable connection for a few hours but got up today to find it synced but PPP down.

Rang Zen again who said circuit had been in sync overnight but PPP had dropped and not recovered since 11 p.m. ish.

Recommended I change the RJ-11 cable so swapped it for a longer Tandy twisted pair one I had and router has been online for nearly two hours now.

Anyone else had an issue where the cable was found to be the cause as at the moment I'm not sure whether to raise a fault with Billion as the router is 2 months old.

I think you're just going to have to wait and see what happens. It seems unlikely it would just cause PPP loss and not loss of sync but I am sure it is possible.

Thanks for the reply.

Seems odd doesn't it but yes you are absolutely right.

Edited by techguy (Sat 22-Nov-14 15:17:52)

I would swap it back, just to check it was plugged securely into the phone socket.

I would automatically have checked all cable connections as a first step with that sort of fault. Something I learned from parallel and serial printers printing gibberish and PCs disappearing from networks even though the Ethernet cables were in place.

Hi Rob

Yep first thing I checked when I discovered the issue as have sometimes nudged the plug when cleaning the cables under my desk.

It's been up for nearly 5 hours solidly, am going to leave things be tonight but am tempted to swap the router back in tomorrow to see how it fares.

What do you think?

Oh, if you kept the Netgear on and things are fine now, then your (presumably) preferred Billion should be fine.

Put the Billion back in about 40 mins ago but left the longer RJ-11 on it, wonder if was just a case of the cable being too short and putting a bit of strain on the plug.