I envy you, I had a charming conversation with "Gareth" this morning who proceeded to tell me that all was well, this disconnection issue is actually a feature believe it or not, and not a fault! In either case, my service is NOT compromised because I can reconnect by turning the modem off and back on again.
Yeah, tell that to my Xbox Live competitors!
He also said I should disable ZoneAlarm - like that would have anything to do with it. But no problem, I hate ZoneAlarm anyway, and as such have never installed it (well, I did years ago, but never used it since). He "knows" I'm using ZoneAlarm because he can't ping my machine - odd, pinging always works for me. But he managed to do a diagnostic on my modem
The diagnostic shows the modem rebooted itself 20 odd times, and I reset it about 40 times over the last 30 days (they can't pinpoint to the last few days apparently) - this is normal and certainly not indicitive of a problem.
Oh, and did you know, this firmware upgrade was done months ago, there's no reason there should be problems now.
Suffice to say, he would not book an engineer, or acknowledge any problem, and advised me to call customer services if I have a complaint