I was working away at the computer this morning quite happily, with a good connection to the Internet. Then the line dropped. This happens occasionally and is usually solved by the traditional formula of “turning it off and on again”. I did this… several times but to no avail. A problem beyond the ordinary seemed to have occurred.

Our Internet Service Provider (ISP) is Zen Internet. They have a very good reputation and I have always found them reliable. Technical support hours are somewhat limited but when support is available, I have always found them most helpful.

This is the third router that we have had during our long relationship with Zen. The first was provided by Zen but we bought the other two ourselves from retailers. I recounted the installation of the current router in All I want for Christmas is a… router! Setting it up was very easy as much of the process was done automatically by the router itself.

The first thing to do was to use my phone to check Zen’s Service Alerts site to see whether there were known failures in our area. There were none.

The next thing was to log on to the router and see if anything could be done via settings. To my surprise, my attempts to log on all failed with an error message telling me that username and password were incorrect. I knew they were correct because I had recorded them in my password file. What was to be done now?

I remembered that when we bought the router, it had factory-set username and password. These were admin and admin. What if I entered these instead?

I tried it and it worked, delivering me to the set-up screen. I would have set up the router again from scratch but I knew that once I put in the basic details, the router would complete the job by itself automatically. I did this, remembering to go into the settings to change the username and password from admin to something of my own.

Then came the moment of suspense: would the computer be able to connect to the Internet? No! It woudn’t! It was receiving a strong enough signal from the router but just not connecting. Time to call those nice people at Zen!

The support person who answered was, as they always are, polite and attentive. He listened without interrupting while I told my story and asked him whether there was perhaps a local failure that had not yet been posted on the site. No, there were no failures.

He then asked what router I had and proposed to go through the settings with me. When we came to the username and password to connect to our account, I realized where I had gone wrong: I had entered, not the connection username and password but the username and password to access our acciount on Zen’s website! No wonder the router could not connect.

Opening the router’s configuration panel once more, I entered the corrected username and password. Even before I had clicked “save” and exited, I could see that websites were loading in my browser. We were back online!

The only question that remains is why the line dropped in the first place and why, this time, switching off and on didn’t cure it. Maybe the router is becoming a little old and will need replacing sometime soon. I hope that by then the shops will be open so that we can buy a router over the counter rather than have to order one online and wait several days, bereft of Internet, until it is delivered.