Gidday Guys,

I have an issue which I would like to discuss, one that you can guess from the topic of this post. So here goes,

I am the Sales/IT Manager for a small company in South Auckland, where we use Compass Communications (for both our Wired and Wireless Broadband solutions). We are trying to run a simple VPN solution (inbuilt into our Cisco 857 router) to grant access when i am travelling round the country. 

Here is where we have constant problems,
Firstly, our connection drops out intermittantly. This requires a full reboot of the router to get the connection working again. The problem here is that both compass and our router say they are still connected, but just wont transfer and data either direction. This gets even more complicated becuase we have changed routers twice, and used both wireless and wired broadband, this problem still exsists. This problem has an interesting twist as we discovered that by turning off all vpn software (on either router) the dropouts do not happen.

Second Problem, We have trouble connecting to the VPN (when the connection is stable) and i have diagnosed this to another interesting problem. If you ping our gateway, you will get about 50%+ packetloss. This will happen if you ping from slingshot, xnet, telecom etc, the only time you get no packetloss is when you ping via my Vodem. When running a traceroute the packetloss is occuring between my routers and Compass Servers, interesting. 

I have tried connecting both different routers (one using wireless and the other using wired) and get the same symptons/problems.

Anyone got any ideas from here? Other than dumping Compass, which is a valid option right now, as they seem unwilling to resolve the problem and keep either pointing at us, or every other ISP in New Zealand.

Cheers,
Mike J