I am using an SMC Barricade router. It works great. every once in a while it quits. I get a staus of " pppoe disconnected ". If I disconnect the router my internet works. Can't figure this out. I have tried reinstalling the router, software etc. Then it seems to restart after awhile. What the heck is going on?

> If I disconnect the router my internet works. not sure what you mean by this... are you disconnecting from the router and then connecting directly to the Modem/Internet. A few more details on this may help... As to your issue I think it's related to the fact that you can only "lease" an IP from certain ISPs for so long before they will FORCE a new IP address to be leased. Reason for this is that with newer routers and the "always on" pinging tricks they do, ISPs do now want people to start serving Web/SQL dbs on their home pcs over local accounts. For this reason many ISPs will lease an IP for only a matter of days/weeks before forcing a new lease. I have seen many routers (and mine has had this very issue) get confused during the release/renew processing of the forced lease and not want to reconnect to the internet. Power cycling the router will FORCE it to look for a new lease and that is why it often times corrects the issue (if you have had the router turned off long enough - some routers take as long as 5 minutes as recommended by their support). To verify that this is your issue, you can always check to see what the router IP is and then when you re-connect the router, or connect your computer directly to the modem/internet... see if that IP address has changed. Hope that information helps!!! give me a holler back if you still have questions, I will flag this to follow up on later if you re-post. - Michael

You should have an online web configuration to use to set up your router. Here you have to choose your settings, like PPPoE. And a place to choose to [keep connection alive]. You will also need to put your host name and domain name and user name and password in here on the setup page. Then click on apply. After this you should be able to go to a status page of some sort to check and see if your static IP numbers have been accepted. I use a Lynksys router and this is how it is set up. Also I have researched as to why my download speeds reduce to as low as 1.4kbs sometimes. I found that sometimes the connection just "wears out". When this happens you have to reset it. To do this knock all the settings out that I just told you to put in. Then click apply. Then put all the information back in again. This will reset the connection. I have to do it about once every week or so. When at first you don't succeed... Ask at Computing.net... They always have the answers...

even so... using PPOE with a "keep alive" option selected in your router (like Linksys - which is what I use as well) you can still have a refresh/release problem when the ISP forces a new IP lease and temporary loss of internet connectivity via the router. I still have this problem w/ my router once in awhile if I am actively using the connection when the renew of IP is forced. If this occurs you will still need to either reset your router in the software or power cycle. I haven't ever experienced the slow down of my connection, but that's good info that I'll keep in mind if I ever run across that issue. Hope that helps! - Michael