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[pscocoa]

I have not had to ring 02 support at all on service issues since I moved from the disastrous Orange in September 2008.

In last 10 days or so I have been getting disconnection and reconnection after the 02 troubleshooter pops up so phoned them last night. They tell me that Vista does not like certain channel settings on the router (mine is an 02 supplied Netgear I think) so they changed it remotely to channel 9 and now all seems fine.

This info may be of use to someone out there to avoid the temptation of tweaking things yourself.

[KillerWatt]

O2 use Thomson routers, but that is immaterial as OS's aren't bothered about which channel you are on.

What is much more likely is that a neighbour was on the same (or an adjacent) channel and that was causing the wireless dropouts.

Certain Cisco routers give an extra channel nor normally available in the UK, and they can bang out much more than the pissy 28mW Tx power that UK routers are restricted to, so interference isn't a problem 

[TheBoy]

As KW says, most likely reason for regular disconncts (at wifi level) is neighbour on same channel.

Channels 1, 6 and 11 are the non operlapping ones.

Change the country setting of router to non UK, and you may get 12 and 13, though these are obviously illegal

If, like me, there are simply no channels left (I can see 16 APs from here as I type), moving to 802.11a is an option, though range is reduced (despite what A fanatics may claim)

[KillerWatt]

Change the country setting of router to non UK, and you may get 12 and 13, though these are obviously illegal

We already (legally) go up to channel 13 in the UK mate (although they aren't really channels as such, it's just frequency spacing).

A decent firmware gives channel 14, and also allows for a much higher Tx power than what nanny says we can have.

Also, simple everyday objects such as microwave ovens and baby monitors kill wi-fi stone dead if they are operated in close proximity (because they operate on the same frequency).

For those that aren't wi-fi literate, you are operating a microwave transceiver (yes, that's microwave as in the same frequency your oven works at), and microwave really likes to be "line of sight".

You start introducing objects (eg, walls) in to the eqaution, and the signal dies very quickly.

[mars]

We have his 'n' her laptops on o2 broadband (wireless) with vista premium and they have both been trouble free and are very fast. Our previous computer had Windows xp and was on Orange and we had nothing but trouble with it. Can't praise o2 enough
 

[TheBoy]

We have his 'n' her laptops on o2 broadband (wireless) with vista premium and they have both been trouble free and are very fast. Our previous computer had Windows xp and was on Orange and we had nothing but trouble with it. Can't praise o2 enough
 

More likely to be the wifi config than the ISP - both ISPs use pretty poor routers as standard.

[KillerWatt]

We have his 'n' her laptops on o2 broadband (wireless) with vista premium and they have both been trouble free and are very fast. Our previous computer had Windows xp and was on Orange and we had nothing but trouble with it. Can't praise o2 enough
 

More likely to be the wifi config than the ISP - both ISPs use pretty poor routers as standard.

Is that "poor" from an end user configuration side, or poor overall?

If the latter, then I'd be interested to hear your experiences.