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[Solstice]

Hi all..

Sometimes we have bad noise / crackles on our phone line, especially when its windy or raining. This causes our Voyager 2110 router modem, to lose the connection...problem is that it immediately tries to resync with the exchange and if it does, it usually resyncs at a very slow speed

This means that our IP / BRAS Profile gets put right down low (usually 135 kbps) and it stays that way for 3 days.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent this? ie When modem gets disconnected because of crackles...it stays disconnected. Then, when I think the line is quiet again, I can manually connect to the internet...hopefully avoiding these very slow sync speeds.

thanks for any advice.

[Astral]

Welcome to the forum.

Report the crackling as a telephone fault. You won't get charged for fixing that and that should improve your ADSL as well.

[Solstice]

Thanks for the reply

I did report it and we had a BT engineer out to the house..but sods law, when he arrived the phone line was totally quiet with no crackling. He went up the pole and did a few things but that same night we had the crackling again

I have phoned them again and said that the intermittent crackling is really effecting our internet speeds...but I was told that I should phone my ISP and tell them about it. I phoned my ISP (Orange) and spent about an hour on the phone to an Indian tech support guy who sounded like he was just reading from a script...recommending I reboot the router, refresh my browser and other pointless things...then he said theyd do a line test, and I should give it a few days. Its now over a week later and still nothing.

So as can you see, finding out how to prevent low syncs with my router/modem is pretty much my only option now

Ive found in the configuration/Quick Setup page of my Voyager 2110 this..

Session established by: Always On
        
There are 2 other selectable options...

Dial on Demand
Disconnect if no activity for  20 minutes (20 minutes is a changeable amount)

Or..

Manually Connect
Disconnect if no activity for 20 minutes

But I dont know what the difference between these 2 is..or how I would "manually connect" if I selected that...

Im trying to prevent Automatic Resync with the exchange immediately after losing sync due to crackles..and not just automatically connecting to the internet (is there any difference?)..on the Voyager 2110 there are 2 seperate lights that come on.. 1 called "ADSL" and the other called "Internet". I presume that when the ADSL light comes on it means that my router has syncd with the exchange already, and when the Internet light comes on that means it has successfully connected to the internet....is this wrong? maybe the router hasnt synced with the exchange untill the Internet light comes on..in which case, what does the ADSL light signify.

As you can probably tell Im a little confused by all this..
   

Im on a 3 Mbit ADSL Max connection and sometimes have download speed of about 350kB but when I suffer from this low sync problem because of crackles on the phone line, my IP profile gets put down to 135kbps which means I only get download speeds of about 15 kB...very frustrating!

It then takes 3 or 4 days for the speed to go up, but because of the bad weather we are having at the moment I usually get about 1 day of nice fast speeds before I get the many disconnects and the IP profile goes down again.

Another thing I cant understand is why on Earth, does the IP profile go down after just a few minutes of slow sync speed but it takes 3 days or more to go back up again!! why doesnt it just get raised a few minutes after I have synced at 3416 kbps or whatever. Or better yet..why isnt it designed so that whatever speed my modem syncs at..thats the speed I will get. Im sure there is some sensible explination for the need of this IP/BRAS profile thing but IMHO it is a very bad system.

[Astral]

I'm afraid you'll have to persist with getting the line fault sorted. Until that is resolved you are going to have problems with re-synching. It's going to be wet & windy all this week so it would be a good time for BT to look at it.

BT are just fobbing you off. Orange can do nothing to cure the line fault.

[Solstice]

Ok thankyou..I will get in touch with BT again, chances are though theyll send out an engineer and the line will be quiet again ..the trouble with BT is that its not like I can threaten to take my business elsewhere if it doesnt get sorted..

If anyone knows exactly what I can do to manually prevent auto resync with the Voyager 2110...so that I can click something myself to do it, when I can hear there are no crackles on the line..Id still very much like to know.

[kitz]

Hi and welcome

Astral is right in that ultimately it needs to be reported as a line fault.... however back to the question about the auto-reconnect.

Dial on demand is when the router should automatically connect if it sense an application on one of the PCs trying to access the internet.  This could be you surfing or it could be say your anti-virus checking for updates.

Manually connect is when you have to physically start the router session from the Voyager pages.

>> how I would "manually connect" if I selected that...

You'd have to log in to the router interface pages and click the connect button on the first page. 
You wont see the button if youre already connected... (if youre already connected it shows the connection status and online time etc).

TBH I'm not 100% certain if either of these will work.  I suppose it will depend if you have had activity in the last xmins as to whether it will try to auto-reconnect again.


>> I presume that when the ADSL light comes on it means that my router has syncd with the exchange already,
 
Correct,
the next bit of the connection is with your ISP part, and that you have "authentication".

>> maybe the router hasnt synced with the exchange untill the Internet light comes on

As above - Its the "DSL light" that shows you have sync'd to the exchange and it should be solid green.  If its flashing slowly then your router is trying to achieve sync..  although depending on the model of router this light sometimes flickers quickly for a short period when its trying to authenticate your login.

[MikeS]

Hi

You definitely have to get the phone fault fixed.  If it starts crackling phone 151 (freephone) to report it to BT, it will make you feel better shouting down a crackly line if nothing else.  I've spent a lot of time with my line trying to avoid getting a 250K IP profile and it just doesn't work.

[setecio]

Hi

You definitely have to get the phone fault fixed.  If it starts crackling phone 151 (freephone) to report it to BT, it will make you feel better shouting down a crackly line if nothing else.  I've spent a lot of time with my line trying to avoid getting a 250K IP profile and it just doesn't work.

If you could rig up something to record your telephone conversation and make several complaints on different days during crackles, then when a BT engineer arrives you can play the recording, and keep building up recordings until it is fixed ...... hassle, but it might help getting it fixed. You should, at the start of each conversation, inform the BT person you speak to that you are recording the conversation and explain why.

[Solstice]

Thankyou so much for all the help & advice 

I must say that this is a really great website! Ive learned lots of useful things from browsing the main site and discovered things like the DMT tool which works well with my Voyager 2110..but at the moment I dont think reducing my target SNR is a good idea, because then I will probably lose sync even more often lol

Thanks kitz for that great explanation! I understand now...Ive tried out the Dial on demand option, but it didnt seem to make a difference...the "DSL" light  came on straight away, and soon connected automatically to the internet. Maybe my firefox browser caused that cos I had it open at the time.

I will test "Manually connect" tomorrow ... so, if I see the connect button on the first page, that means it hasnt synched with the exchange yet? hmm I will have to see if the DSL light is on at the same time as when I can see the "connect" button..that way Ill know for sure if that option is going to work or not.

I've spent a lot of time with my line trying to avoid getting a 250K IP profile and it just doesn't work.

Yes its very frustrating...especially when, like me, you like to spend quite alot of time on the internet . At the moment, as soon as I realize Ive lost my internet connection I sprint down the stairs (often jumping the last 7 or 8 lol) to the hall and check the router lights..if Ive got there in time and the DSL light is still flashing Ill unplug the router from the phone socket, and wait for a few minutes before plugging it back in lol ..not an ideal situation. Im beginning to think I should have just stuck with my fixed rate 1Mb line..at least then it didnt matter how many times I got disconnected , the speed never changed.

If you could rig up something to record your telephone conversation and make several complaints on different days during crackles, then when a BT engineer arrives you can play the recording,

Thats a great idea, thanks! Im not sure how I can go about doing that..but Ill deffinately look into it. The other problem with that is that when I first pick up the phone after Ive been diconnected from the internet..the crackles are really bad (sounds like someone scrunching a bag of crisps in your ear) but then , after about 5 seconds of listening to the dial tone they have pretty much gone...sometimes I pick up the phone and dial that quiet line test number straight away (17070, option 2) and again..within a few seconds I have a totally quiet line..its almost as if picking up the reciever somehow fixes whatever is causing the crackling.

[Astral]

its almost as if picking up the receiver somehow fixes whatever is causing the crackling.

Sounds like a high resistance fault which abates when there is an easier current path through the telephone. Make sure you describe those symptoms to the next engineer who visits and hopefully you'll get it fixed.

[kitz]

>> Sounds like a high resistance fault which abates when there is an easier current path through the telephone.

Indeed it does, this is what the BT guys sometimes call a *high open* fault and is usually caused by oxydisation of a joint (rust to you and me).
The additional current when the phone is in use is just sufficient to bridge the gap to restore the signal.