Hi All
It starting to feel like my ISP is more confused than I am.
Before Christmas, my father started to bend my ear over the quality of the broadband connection - dropped connection. So I contacted the ISP and they confirmed the existence of a line fault. Two engineer visits later and it resulted in a new master socket. After a bit of reading, I disconnected the line extension, added a NTe5 filtering faceplace and replaced the ISP supplied RJ11 cable - a short 0.5m (maybe a little too short). The resulting impact of these changes, with the ISP providing their most up to-date wireless router, the line attenuation figure went down.
With the line fixed, I looked further into why my father computer was coughing and splutting its way around the internet - jamming up while attempting to load a page. Changes to the browser, netsh cmd's, optimising the adapter, MTU - essentially everything recommended on this site, yet the issue continued - although much abated. Once the computer was 'fixed', i.e. I had exhausted all my options, I started looking at the router and discovered the ISP's most up to-date router is awaiting a firmware update, it has a fault that produces a large number of errors. What this means for my connection the ISP has yet to explain. So, I switched out the router, replaced it with the old router and download speed increased from 6mbs to 8mbs.
Looking and learning about the router settings made me think that maybe something in there was slowing things down. My line is 2.2km, 1.3km long, or perhaps 1.475km depending on who you speak to at the ISP. Line attenuation figure is 30.7 or 27.9 depending on the router used. It should sync anywhere between 18000 - 13500 kbps. The most obvious issue was interleaving. Interleaving suggests noise on the line and my line was fixed, filtered, on the right channel etc. So I had it in mind this was the most likely cause of my fathers jittery browsing experience. Further reading led to the ISP agreeing to make the following changes:
- line profile was changed to 'fast path' (made without my request)
- interleaving decreased from 64 to 1
- SNR margin reduced to 3db (I was happy when it was lowered from 9db to 6db, 3db was not my idea)
The first change really didn't do much, the second moved things along, the third bingo! That said, I was surprised by the approach taken by the ISP - I expected the changes to be made progressively, 64,32,16 etc. But no. Once I bent their ear for long enough, a change would be made. I tried asked about the state of the DLM - ILQ, but no answer. so bending their ear appears to be the approach.
So ... until today, my thinkbroadband tests have all been consistent - low latency, zero jitter, line A+ and a solid graph, huge amounts of buffer bloat. Having spoken to too many technical manager, I spoke to a fault manager, the fix turns out to be setting my router channel to 'Auto', applying an interleaving depth of 64 and increasing the SNR margin to 12db. Apparently, this will increase my line speed. The lead up to this call, was a change to the line profile, reducing the SNR to 3db - not my idea, but I have noticed a change in my trace, an increase in SNR to 9db and asked for an explanation. We told they could see one error per hour. So the agreement was, the line would be monitored for 7 days. My understanding was that no changes would be made until 7 days of data was collated - but no and hence the call today and conversation with the fault manager.
After watching a number of poorly pixelated and synced film, the warning from thinkbroadband appear to be true. A+ line stat no more and I'm fairly frustrated with my progress! If the fault managers approach is to be thorough and start at the beginning, that's great. I don't mind that. But I do mind being advised not to run more than a couple of computers to the network at any one time. I'm fairly convinced, the next three days are unlikely to see my broadband revert to previous values, like the advisor said 'trust me'!
If anyone here could help me understand what questions I need to ask to get an insight into the problem that would be appreciated, as the apparent random approach taken by the ISP is going nowhere fast. I'd like to fix the problem.
Cheers
[Moderator edited to remove approximately six inches of trailing white space.]
