After 3 years without any major problems, I have now had no wireless internet from my Livebox for over a month.
Up until Christmas, I had a PC (XP), my girlfriend’s laptop (Vista), my Wii and 2 mobile phones connected wirelessly to my livebox. At Christmas I treated myself to a PS3. It connected with no problems to the livebox and everything worked fine, for about a week…
All of a sudden, everything stopped working. I assumed the Orange server was down or it was somehow down to the bad weather but it was all down to the livebox. At best, we could get connected for about 2 mins max and then it would just go again.
I have spent the last month in countless conversations with Orange's 'overseas' technical support. When I'd had enough of them, I called to cancel my contract and only then did they offer me some UK support. After they finally agreed that something must be wrong with the livebox, they agreed to send me a new one. It was around this time that we tried a wired connection which worked pretty much ok, but was still a bit unreliable.
I received the new livebox a couple of days ago and to my horror, I still cannot get anything to work. The wired connection is ok-ish but nothing will connect wirelessly. I spoke with Orange again and after an hour on the phone they gave up and said they’ll be sending me a Siemens router to try instead.
Last night I borrowed an old wireless router from my brother and after a bit of work I managed to get both the PC and the laptop connected wirelessly and working fine. I’ve had to settle for WEP security though as it seems Vista won’t accept the WPA1 security that this old-ish router offers. I have not yet tried to connect my PS3.
My question is this. Is the PS3 somehow the source of all these problems??? How, after all these years, can my house just suddenly lose the ability to have a working Livebox?
Any wireless devices before the most recent .n standard are not really designed to handle multiple sustained wireless connections, 2 or 3 is usually not a problem but any more and you're putting a massive amount of load on the device which could end up frying something.
I'd get in touch with Orange and request a new livebox and start using a wired connection for some of your devices (I suggest PS3 if you're in to online gaming).
Please email your landline/account number to me and I will look into this for you. You can contact me at customer.services@orange.co.uk and please add 'Jonathan Orange Response' in the first line, so the mail can be picked up quickly.
Thank you very much for the responses. I guess I have put a lot of pressure on the old Livebox.
My replacement Livebox didn’t work for more than 5 minutes and that was just trying one connection to my PC. On Friday I received the Siemens router which worked fine all weekend with all my equipment but as of this morning has almost completely died. I will look into the N standard router and see if that helps.
Joined: 13 Nov 2009Posts: 408Location: South East Essex
I'd be very concerned as to why these routers keep dying so quickly.
If you're looking to a new N Wireless router well I've just bought a Netgear DGN2000 from Comet (£62). Well impressed so far & you can tweak your connection with a piece of software called DTM.
You're right, it's so strange. I just can't understand why it's happening.
Funnily enough I was looking at that same router on Amazon.co.uk/?tag=orangeprobcou-21&camp=6&creative=6786&linkCode=ur1"> Amazon today. I'm glad you've recommended it. What do you have hooked up to it?
Joined: 13 Nov 2009Posts: 408Location: South East Essex
blackjackdavey13 wrote:
Hi tinytim
You're right, it's so strange. I just can't understand why it's happening.
Funnily enough I was looking at that same router on Amazon.co.uk/?tag=orangeprobcou-21&camp=6&creative=6786&linkCode=ur1"> Amazon today. I'm glad you've recommended it. What do you have hooked up to it?
Only my 4 PC's. I will have my Wii by wireless , my Xbox by ethernet as well as my Panasonic Freesat recorder.
My recommendation is based on only 3 days usage, just bear that in mind.
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