Frankly the advice to restart the router seems designed to get the caller off the line!

In reply to a post by DSLer:

20% of our support calls are related to this.

Whose support calls? Who are you?

I work for an ISP call centre.

In reply to a post by DSLer:

I work for an ISP call centre.

It's not a "generic problem" it is just a lot of problems that could still exist while the internet is green.

-Router has frozen
-Computer did not get DHCP
-Stale DNS cache
-Wireless has stalled and failed to broadcast properly, or has momentarily stalled during the DHCP stage and the computer then assigned itsself an APIPA address for a while or something, a reboot of the router forces a disconnection and reconnection.

All those things can occur and stop internet browsing yet the router may still have a green internet light...

If the ISP you work for get this an extrordinary amount of times either the routers you are supplying are carp or there is something wrong with the ISP. Becuase I have never had this issue in the manner you describe.

But then again I don't need to tell you how stupid the average internet user is, they will do all sorts of funky and creative things to stop stuff working properly.

Edited by Pipexer (Sun 17-Jul-11 13:35:49)

Thank you for your post.

I would have thought it was our routers, but a good proportion of such calls come from people using their own routers.

This leads me to believe we may have a problem in our ISP core network. Any ideas on the core network side?

Doesn't the router logs provide a clue?

Sounds like an ISP authentication failure or its authentication servers are down.

Although not quite the same thing, i now someone who lives in the usa,Their isp AT&T , and the router sometimes suffers disconnections from the net due to the router randomly loosing auth (as the Internet light will change from green to red briefly ) before returning back to green, this is a common occurrence with that Isp as it appears in a number of forums

Edited by tommy45 (Sun 17-Jul-11 14:24:31)

It's not a login problem because if the user credentials are incorrect, the user is taken to a landing page informing him to verify his credentials.

that doesn't happen on BT Wholesale circuits - if the credentials are wrong you don't get a PPP login and hence don't get an IP address.

Which ISP ?

This leads me to believe we may have a problem in our ISP core network. Any ideas on the core network side?

Over populated home gateway ?

Stale sessions ?

Bit sad that an ISP's tech support is asking for advice on this on a public forum. Has your sys admin guy got no answers ?