Cisco VPN Disconnecting

In our office of 5 people we are using Cisco VPN. If one person logs on, it is fine and works, however if anyone else logs on, it will drop the internet connection/emails, then proceed to disconnect people from the VPN. We have another member of staff who works in the office next door and when she connects to the VPN using the same token, she has no issues and can continue, and we are not affected. Sometimes (once in a blue moon) we can all be connected with little to no issues, but this doesn't happen often.

This has been going on for some months and we have to restart each individual PC when we get disconnected. We have asked our IT company who we sub-contract out and they are unable to resolve this, however, have not looked into this in much depth.

Does anyone have any ideas of why this is happening? All 5 members of staff need to be connected to the VPN at all times, however we seem to spend most of our time in the office trying to re-connect and waiting for computers to re-start and such.

We are using Windows 7 Professional, 32-bit OS. We are all so frustrated with this so I have taken this upon myself to sort out. I have search forums all afternoon in regards with this.

Can anyone offer any suggestions?

To the best of my knowledge. Some NATs can detect the call ID “conflict” and will modify them to keep the multiple VPN connections unique. The NAT must have a PPTP editor to allow this. This of course isn’t something router manufacturers generally advertise on their spec sheets. You will need to go digging around on their website to find. For example on the Netgears routers VPN support page, you will see some Netgear routers only support one VPN connection; this will be where they can’t modify the call ID’s while some other Routers that could support multiple VPN connections. So kindly contact your router support center and make sure it's support multiple VPN connections.