I have succesfully implimented about 10 adsl based home networks in
the past. However in the last week I have had identical problems with
2 customers - one in rural Sussex and one in rural Cambridgeshire.
Each has just had the ability to connect via ADSl for the first time
due to exchange improvements. In each case 2 Netgear
adsl wireless routers and 2 BT Voyager 2100
adsl wireless routers failed to connect to the ADSL circuit. The
lights show the circuit as active but connection could not be
acheived. In each case the BT supplied router worked ok. The BT Yahoo
circuits are not tied to a mac address and it was not a userid or
password issue since the same details worked with the provided
hardware. The settings of pppoa_0_38 are the same as I have used
in the past. I would really appreiate any pointers to what the issue
may be.

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Clarification of Question by petasys-ga on 07 Mar 2005 09:01 PST

Thanks neutron_coding-ga. 
I was thinking along similar lines, however the Cambridge home is
within about 5km of the exchange - not sure about the Sussex one but I
suspect it will be further. At the Sussex site I phoned BT and raised
this very issue - they denied that signal strength could be the issue
and poo poo'd my question. However I didn't realise they could run
specific tests on the signal strength.

The reason I went on to try the BT wireless router after two failures
with Netgear was in case they were more resilient to weak signals.
Maybe the ones they ship out to customers are more resilient than the
ones they sell in the shops.
I will call BT again but it is soooo hard to talk to anybody at BT who
understands what they are doing instead of working down a checklist.
Thanks

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Clarification of Question by petasys-ga on 08 Mar 2005 12:23 PST

The answer is that .....

BT assign a username of xxx@btinternet.com when they email you saying
that the adsl is about to be enabled.   When the circuit is enabled
they change the ID to be xxx@btbroadband.com - but often they fail to
tell you this.  I changed the ID from @btinternet.com to
@btbroadband.com and it worked. I mentioned this to the helpdelsk and
they sheepishly admitted that this is a common problem.

Thanks BT !!  only a couple of days of my life wasted.

First, what is the distance between your customers and the central office or 
the main junction box (can't remember the formal name) that they
connect to. I bet the distance is just within allowable limits for
ADSL.

Second, the lights on your router mean nothing, at least that's what
happenned on my dsl connection.

On my connection, the lights would light up, but couldn't connect.
Called my phone company, after a few days of working around the clock,
they fixed my DSL. It seems that I was just barely within allowable
limits. They tried all sorts of things like swithing pairs, putting
new lines in, etc. In the end they had to resort to checking my line
from the main box all the way to my house and removing bridge taps
along the way.

The moral of the story, call you phone or dsl provider. They can do
tests to check the signal strength of ADSL and fix it.