Thought it’d be worth a go on here first before I attempt to speak to the fountain of knowledge that is BT’s Broadband helpdesk.

Got BT broadband. Everything was ok until recently when I lost connection. Whats weird is that the internet connection is still there! Running a Netgear wireless router and whether I have the ethernet cable plugged in or wireless, it says in the system tray that the connection is running and you can see its transferring data but when trying to open Outlook it says that the BT mail server can’t be found and I can’t get onto the net either.

Its driving me nuts – any ideas anyone?

Is any other device accessing the wireless network?

Could be an IP address conflict. I had it the other night where the router was trying to assign the same IP address on two different laptops. Disabling the wireless on one of them sorted it. My symptoms were the same. Connected to the network and could see data being transferred but I was unable to load up anything on the internet.

Not tried that yet. Theres only this one device (at the moment – thats why I started the thread at silly o’clock because my works laptop won’t connect so I had to come into the office to deal with a callout!) but I’ll try and assign it a specific IP address instead of it trying to get it automatically…

BT Broadband’s helpdesk are excellent.

has the router itself got an IP address (it will be something other than 192.168.x.x – an external address)?

Sounds to me like the LAN side of things is working but not the WAN (could be ADSL or external DNS problem for example)

LAN ain’t working either. Same thing – says its connected but its not working.

Going to spend some time looking at it Sunday since its 04:07 on a Sunday morning and I’m back in work because I can’t dial in from home!

Looks like I might be in for another sunrise over Calderdale from my office!