Problem with Sky Internet/Emails

We recently had a problem with a Sky Internet Connection, the router had just suddenly stopped responding, with no warning or clue as to why. There were no configuration changes and no changes to the hardware.

The router in question was a Netgear, a pretty standard router distributed by Sky, after stripping out some pretty unconventional wiring and running the router directly to the test port in the BT master socket, the router was still not connecting to the Internet.

There was a solid amber/orange light on the @ symbol, which the technical support guys at Sky suggested meant it was talking to their servers but not authenticating.

The solution was a line test their end, which cleared the session from their authentication servers, which suggests that their servers either dropped some connected sessions or were rebooted at some point.