Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Kai Robinson]

Hey everyone - apologies for taking soooo long in getting back to you, but talking to France Telecom and having them admit any kind of fault, is like pulling teeth. In the dark. With a spoon.

I had an engineer come out and confirm that the internal wiring was new, and worked flawlessly, and that the problem was with the external cabling to the house.

He then said; "The wiring from your house to the exchange, as well as the junction box on the telephone pole, needs to be completely replaced, it's manky."

Then after a day at the exchange, he fiddled with something, and voila - the connection got a bit better...for about a week.

Last week, the line got SO bad, you could barely hear a dial tone. I reported a line fault, and later on that day, got a call back from an engineer who said 'i can't be bothered to come out, you live in a strange place, i don't know where you are'. Then, i lost all phones and DSL completely. Literally, you picked up the phone, and all you could hear was something akin to an asthmatic breathing into the other end, and any incoming callers were deafened by static.

At this point, i was at the end of my wick, and drove 70km round trip to the France Telecom office in St. Malo to demand that my line get fixed.

This morning, a van with a cherry picker turned up, and started testing the line from my pole, to the village. I didnt speak to them, except to confirm that my name was the reportee on their docket. when i got back, my line had not been replaced to the phone pole, nor the junction box. However, the dialtone on the phone was crystal clear, and the Router had effectively thrown a fit at having sync, probably surprised at actually having something to do, other than sit on the desk and look fancy...

Turns out that the phone line from the exchange passes along the side of the road, and a few trees had overgrown, and were only being held up by the phone cable in certain stretches - the whole side of the road looks like it's been a tree massacre, branches and piles of sawdust, new phone poles (4 of them) and at least 4 sections of new cable.

Now, i'm still reporting high attenuation, but, the quality of the line is much better, better than it's been in 10 years.

See this picture for all the details, but that looks much better to me...reckon i could let them bump me onto the 1 meg service, for a 400kbps speed boost?



I know, blistering speed, yo.

Although having read your comments - why is my attenuation STILL so high? Most people are in the 30 to 55dB range from my exchange, if degrouptest.com is to be believed...

[roseway]

The attenuation is directly related to the length of your line, i.e. the cable linking you to the exchange. You unfortunately have a very long line, and it's never going to get any shorter. I'm afraid that the best you can hope is that the present quality improvement remains in place.

Sorry not to sound more encouraging.

[GunJack]

looks like if they have a 2meg service, it may be worth a try.....you've got a couple of dB snrm to spare if you need to tweak it. Give it a go and see how you get on

[Kai Robinson]

Hmm...wondering about how long it takes for the DSLAM to update the statistics, as the line tester at degrouptest says i can still only support a download speed of 451kbps O.o

I'm going back to St. Malo today, and want to ask them to shove me on the 1mbps service, but....they might refuse, and say 'your line doesn't support it' :/

Edit: I did a 60 minute test using DMT - looks pretty stable to me, compared to the one on page 1

[Kai Robinson]

Heyo - just thought i'd stop in to update...seems like i counted my chickens before they hatched. Despite working almost flawlessly for months, since they chopped tree branches and put new telephone poles in, in the last week, the service has been erratic, patchy and downright infuriating, whenever i've been trying to get any work done, or talk to my Fiancee over Skype.

SNRM's are usually pretty high, but with the rotten weather, rain, high winds, the SNRM's will suddenly drop to from say....16db (on ReADSL Mode) or 11dB (ADSL2 Mode), to around half that value, and then recover a bit, then drop to 0, then disconnect, then reconnect at a low SNRM, only to disconnect again a few seconds later. Can take me a DAY to reconnect. I did report a line fault and they confirmed one existed...and all was stable for an afternoon, SNRM's barely wavered and i thought all was fixed.

Now, however, the problem has resurfaced, there's crackle on the line, the router can't make up its mind whether to bother trying to sync DSL at all - and these are with supposedly NEW lines (at least until the telegraph pole over the road (500m away). I'm in two minds right now - it's either a) all down to the weather being so miserable - in which case, why is RAIN and no wind affecting the line, unless there's a leaky junction box somewhere? or b) France Telecom are entirely incompetent and have screwed something up at the exchange...again.

The question i also wanted to ask, is this; My router can connect via different modes, t1.413, G.dmt, G.lite, ADSL2/2+ and Annex L (ReADSL) but...is there any way i can FORCE the exchange to connect via one of those methods? I have Annex L selected on the routers Advanced Settings page, as when it does connect, by shoving everything under the 552kHz range, the SNRM is much higher, and the connection much more stable. Problem is, even with it selected in the router, DMT reports it connecting via ADSL2 pretty much all the time, and it can take multiple resyncs for the mode to change to ReADSL again.

Are any of you familiar with the adslctl command on Broadcom based routers? Or, is this the sort of thing that can be set/locked from the exchange side only, via a call to tech support (assuming i get an engineer, rather than a nose-picking moron with a phone)?

[GunJack]

I'm assuming that, irrespective of what you set in the router, the exchange will only sync at what it's capable of (in terms of modulation type), so unless FT enable or can supply the various modulation types, who knows   Sorry not to be more positive, but I know less about FT than I do about UK (...and that ain't too much )

I'm sure some of the more knowledgable peeps could help....but still sounds like your line has major issues