COULD IT BE THIS SIMPLE???!!!..................................READ ON!!………….
I am one of the ‘victims’ of what seems like all the combinations of lights, problems etc on a lot of the posts and have spent many hours – if not days trying to sort my SS out.
Logically, to me, something that is designed for the average person to plug it in and away you go should NEVER have to have Mr/Mrs/Miss Average delving into the router settings adjusting and changing things that he/she would probably have no idea about (or have any interest in for that matter)! Yet here we have pages and pages of problems, and no doubt equal, if not more calls to customer service with similar problems, where you are told to do all manner of thing to your router (which quite often mucks up other things when you have to keep resetting etc!) and still it doesn’t solve the problem! That is the ‘rant’ over with, now to tell you my ‘solution’ (if you can call it that)?...….
I have had teething problems when I first got the SS as most people probably did, which was understandable as VF did their best to accommodate customers over the moon about being able to get a signal where previously it was impossible. Once that had passed my SS settled down to working lovely, and for months no problem apart from the odd reset (I can live with that). It was connected to then a Speedtouch 585 router – no port forwarding, no port clamping, no nothing – just plug and play.
Suddenly for no reason (like many others) it just stopped! Tried all the combinations of instructions under the sun, spent what seemed like an eternity on the phone being told to do all sorts of things that as I have said before would confuse many people and perhaps even question why the heck they had bothered! Eventually I thought it must be my router so I plugged a new BT Homehub 2 in, configured all the port forwarding as told in forums and on the phone and it worked! (This is not the end!!)
Months later it stopped again(solid light 1 to flashing light 1 after trying to reconnect) and no matter what I did, couldn’t get it going again – deleted profile in hub, redid port fwd, reset SS, reboot router, reassigned IP address (had to tell the router a different ‘range’ of addresses to assign to things like my PC, phone etc), spent ages re-reading forums in the hope a solution had been found for the seemingly ‘random’ problems, spoke to customer tech level 2!? and asked what/why this happens, just told to do all the things I had already done, even left it for 2 days while I went away – still flashing light 1 on my return!
I was about to give up and throw it against the wall (yes I really was gonna do it!), ripped it out of where it sits and thought I would try one more thing – I took it to my friend across the road who has same router, plugged it in and it worked!!????? – The only thing different (as mine was stuck behind the PC) was a different ethernet cable – surely not the problem?? – Left it to cycle for a few minutes and then reset it. Plugged it back into my router (after I had deleted the profile for it in my router and turned off port fwd and port clamping – in effect starting from scratch again), and lo and behold it started working, after about 3 hours it was up and running with full functionality – no port forwarding, clamping etc, just plug & play!
So, as I said at the start of my post – could it be that simple? – maybe, just maybe, a big batch of dodgy ethernet leads, as that could be common to everyone that is having problems. If you say ‘nah, can’t be that’ – then what the heck can it be?? Nobody in tech support seems to have a definitive answer! Did plugging into a different router ‘fix’ it? Did walking across the road giving it some fresh air 'fix it'? Did the threat of it being thrown against the wall 'fix it'? – I, for one have no idea, (I really wish I did, because if you know the problem, you can usually find the solution!) but I have discovered, it seems for now, that all these technical things (for me anyway) just didn’t need to be done!
I hope this is possibly helpful to anyone who has been as frustrated as me! - Ian
