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[tiffy]

I believe/hope that my issue has been resolved.

Had a re-synch just before 09:00 hrs this morning, before which the fault had been very much active.
As I had noted activity at my PCP yesterday afternoon I decided to visit again and found that an OR tech. was indeed working there.
Was not in a position to stop and talk to OR at that time.

Back home I examined my modem/router stat's. in more detail and found that my US synch speed had returned to normal, > 6 Mbps, first time this had occured since issue first presented on 06/04.
Much more significantly, the U1 tone range large "blips" which had been apparent on QLN and HLog DSLStats graphs had completely disappeared, again, first time since pre-fault occurance on 06/04.
US bit loading, bit swapping etc. all looked much more healthy and US error rates were minimal.

Now noted that the OR van had appeared at my adjacent neighbours house and the tech. had gone inside.
We share the same UG cable from the same local distribution point.

After some considerable time and a number of visits the OR tech. left and I was able to visit and get the full story.
His ISP is BT and he is on 40/10 VDSL service, same as mine except I am with Plusnet.
He had been suffering spurioius, intermittant, complete BB failures for some time, he could not remember exactly how long.
He is not very tech. orientated but he believes that the OR tech. reported that he swapped DSLAM ports on his line which cured his issue, looks very much that it has also cured my line issue.
Can't really explain why my line re-synched this morning at 09:00 hrs. but logically it's likely to be associated with whatever the OR tech. was doing in the PCP at that time.

Conclusion:
Our UG distribution cable is a small spur to approx 10 houses and our cable pairs are almost certainly going to be very close if not adjacent.
Whatever was occuring on my neighbours line was having a destinct adverse effect on my line effecting my US synch speed and SNRM in particular while not having a big impact on DS synch speed or SNRM.

What annoys me most at this point is that Plusnet although reluctantly conceding that there was an issue, completely refused to proceed any further on the grounds that BT/OR were refusing to enter customers premises at present due to isolation rules yet it's completely different for a BT customer where they appear to be quite happy to fully investigate/rectify a fault where local access could be required.
It has always been my understanding that under OFCOM rules all ISP's using BT infrastructure must be treated equally with respect to service or could it be that PN are using the current situation to off load "tricky" jobs because they can ?

I have had a lot of administrative issue with Plusnet over the last 18 months but as a customer of 11 years standing I have always remained with PN on the grounds that there tech. support was good when required, that has changed !

Attached, current SNRM, QLN and HLog graphs for reference.
The current SNRM shows before and after this mornings re-synch at 09:00 hrs where the fault was active and then disappeared.
QLN and HLog graphs show the now relatively noise free U1 band.
 

[rjpreston]

tiffy - Good to hear its been fixed one way or the other.

I'm still waiting for BT to turn up, although have had text in the last hour saying he's on his way.

It was very odd for the BT to enter my house yesterday. When i logged the fault i had two conflicting messages - one said that engineers would not be entering customer properties at all, but would do whatever they could remotely. The second message said they wouldn't enter any household which was self-isolating.

[tiffy]

@rjpreston

Yes, there is certainly a lot of contradictory information around at present, very strange times indeed !

As you have BT/OR committed to a visit I'am sure you will get sorted, hopefully today.
My neighbour advised that the OR engineer who attended today just asked if anyone in the house was isolating due to symptoms and if he was happy to permit access, no real issues here anyway with BT/OR N.I. (Northern Ireland) but could well vary from engineer to engineer or area to area.

Will await the outcome of your issue with interest.

[Chrysalis]

tiffy my line got put back on fast path within a day of capping the speed, however I think that was coincidence, i be surprised if dlm would react that quick to a change that probably wasnt relevant (had little impact on ES).  So in my case the recovery was about a week and two days.

I dont know how you can proceed, openreach will say emergencies only, so they probably mean full on outages, and then prioritising vulnerable people as well.

Oscillation that isnt causing an outage is probably seen as a non emergency.

--edit--

I see its fixed, good to know.

[tiffy]

tiffy my line got put back on fast path within a day of capping the speed, however I think that was coincidence, i be surprised if dlm would react that quick to a change that probably wasnt relevant (had little impact on ES).  So in my case the recovery was about a week and two days.

Glad you got sorted, It's good to know the speed capping process still seems to work quite effectively with DLM.

I see its fixed, good to know.

Yes, glad to report all still OK this morning, the only remaining legacy now being DS G.Inp remaining in Re-Tx high profile arising from the earlier Billion modem/router substitution which produced very large amounts of DS ES's/SES's on my line, however, I'am sure DLM or a manual re-synch will revert this back to Re-Tx low profile in time as DS errors are now back to their normal very low/zero value with my normal ZyXEL modem/router back in service.

I think I was lucky in the end to get a resolution, absolutely no thanks to Plusnet, if the fault on my neighbours line had not been causing complete BB disconnections he may have decided to just live with it or indeed may not have noticed at all as he uses the standard BT modem/router box and is none the wiser regarding stat's or line performance.
Also lucky that it was an adjacent neighbour where I more readily became aware of the BT/OR activity and could find out the story, otherwise my fault would have just gone away and I would have never known the root cause.

Will be very interesting to find out what happens with "rjpreston" who appears to be experiencing a very similar scenario at present with his line and is awaiting BT/OR further investigation. 

[siofjofj]

If you're interested, I have had a number of faults which bear some similarities with yours. Every three months or so I start getting wild SNRM fluctuations, large CRC spikes and many resyncs on my TalkTalk ADSL2+ connection, making the internet borderline unusable on some days.

The first two times it happened I reported the problem to TalkTalk and it was a complete nightmare. Although getting Openreach out was easy enough, I had issues with the fault being 'right when tested' since there was nothing wrong with the line itself. Eventually on the third engineer visit I got the line moved to a different port on TalkTalk's MSAN which solved the problem. The issue reoccurred a few months later and was fixed by again changing to a different MSAN port. This then occurred a third time, but before I reported it to TalkTalk, it fixed itself. I created a topic about these three occurrences here https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php/topic,21455.0.html.

Since then it has happened twice more, each time fixing itself around a month after the problems started. I am also suffering with the problem now (and have being for around 1.5 months, so longer than usual) which is a massive pain while trying to work from home. I hadn't bothered reporting it to TalkTalk this time, since I thought that Openreach wouldn't attend the house to do diagnostics and also because I assumed it would once again fix itself. Seemingly these two assumptions may not actually be true.

[tiffy]

@siofjofj

Many thanks for your input and interest.
Have read through your saga as per link provided, very interesting indeed, although a long time kitz patron had not remembered your original post.

Yes, definate similarities but with two distinct differences.

You were, assume still are on ADSL2+ service to an exchange based MSAN, being TalkTalk would assume you are on LLU service.

Much more significantly, the fault was not on my line as such but on a very close neighbours VDSL2 40/10 service line.
Both lines share the same underground branch cable and dist. point and are quite a distance from the DSLAM cabinet, my line DS attenuation is 26.6 dB, assume my neighbour would be very similar.

In my case I have every reason to believe and DSLStats graphs to prove that whatever was happing on my neighbours VDSL2 line was having a very derogatory effect on my lines US performance which I can only assume was due to cross talk effect in our cable ?

As I said in previous post, I was very lucky that my neighbours fault was periodically taking down his BB completely and his ISP was BT who were prepared to investigate further as my ISP, Plusnet, were not prepared, claimed they couldn't forward my issue to OR under the current restrictions.

I certainly sympathise with your issue, an intermittant fault is always more difficult to diagnose/rectify and this is certainly not being helped by our current environment, do hope you can get some action very soon.

Attached, snapshot of my currently very happy lines SNRM, quietly confident that it's actually fixed 
Still on 60 sec's. sample rate and a 1 day "X" axis.   

[rjpreston]

ok. here's my "good news" story so far...

Openreach attended yesterday. We spoke on the doorstep (2m apart!) and he decided he didnt need to bother entering our house. Checked the line from an outside joint box. Changed our line to a spare pair. Went to the FTTC cabinet and, i think did a reset. BB came back up as 29Mb down / 7.7 Up. I was happy. BT went away after about 2 hours on site.

Overnight, the Upstream SNR instability came back. line resync'd 6 times in short succession, reducing the Up speed back to just over 1Mb. Not happy bunny this morning. But I had the mobile phone number of the Openreach guy. I texted him politely and, bless him, he offered to pop back to the cabinet and change "ports". He did just that this afternoon, and all is well again. Touch wood.

Current stats are:
DSLAM type / SW version:   BDCM:0xa4a1 (164.161) / v0xa4a1
Modem/router firmware:     AnnexA version - A2pv6F039x6.d26a
DSL mode:                  VDSL2 Profile 17a
Status:                    Showtime
Uptime:                     6 hours 23 min 42 sec
Resyncs:                   12 (since 15 Apr 2020 08:59:10)
         
            Downstream   Upstream
Line attenuation (dB):     26.9      0.0
Signal attenuation (dB):   Not available on VDSL2      
Connection speed (kbps):   29239      7242
SNR margin (dB):           6.1      6.1
Power (dBm):               12.9      5.9
Interleave depth:          573      1
INP:                       3.00      0
G.INP:                     Not enabled      Not enabled
Vectoring status:          5 (VECT_UNCONFIGURED)

If all remains stable, I expect a few resyncs in coming days to reduce that huge interleave depth which i am guessing is there as a result of so many syncs and reboots recently.

So all i can say is "thank you Openreach." Sterling job. Lets hope it stays that way

[g3uiss]

I’m not sure that depth is “huge” 

[tiffy]

Great news, sounds like a good result.

So, yet another DSLAM port issue, is this becoming more common now ?
You were very lucky to have been given the OR engineers mobile number and that he was willing to re-attend so quickly, obviously a very thoughtful and thorough guy as indeed many are.

I'am sure the DSLAM re-porting process has a similar effect to a DLM reset, note that DS G.Inp has not yet been applied, this is to expectation and will probably be activated within a few days by DLM action.
Note that your line attenuation is almost identical to my line, I'am DS synching at 40 Mpbs so would expect your DS synch speed to improve with further DLM action.
Your US synch speed is good for your line length and over 1 Mbps better than mine.
Every line is different so no hard and fast rules can be applied.

Hope the situation remains stable, will follow your updates with interest.

Noted, cross posting notification.

[j0hn]

Huawei cabinet so the DLM reset has reverted the line from G.INP to Interleaving.

The Interleaving depth will drop to 40-50 when G.INP is enabled again.

Should give av but if a bump to the downstream too.

[Weaver]

@rjpreston is interleave depth really part of something determined by number of ‘reboots’ ie resynchs / retrains ‘ reconnections ? What do we think ? Opinions please.


Tiffy wrote :

> All I will say at present is count yourself lucky your ISP is BT, I am just about to post what I believe is the resolution of my line issus and this will explain my meaning.

@tiffy I have found my ISP (Andrews and Arnold- AA) is very good at getting Openreach going on my behalf. I have had two faults recently but have not even needed an engineer to come into the house. They used to sometimes come in and take measurements but I wonder if they are maybe just skipping those anyway now, so that they can get on with their jobs and do safely.

[Chrysalis]

ok. here's my "good news" story so far...

Openreach attended yesterday. We spoke on the doorstep (2m apart!) and he decided he didnt need to bother entering our house. Checked the line from an outside joint box. Changed our line to a spare pair. Went to the FTTC cabinet and, i think did a reset. BB came back up as 29Mb down / 7.7 Up. I was happy. BT went away after about 2 hours on site.

Overnight, the Upstream SNR instability came back. line resync'd 6 times in short succession, reducing the Up speed back to just over 1Mb. Not happy bunny this morning. But I had the mobile phone number of the Openreach guy. I texted him politely and, bless him, he offered to pop back to the cabinet and change "ports". He did just that this afternoon, and all is well again. Touch wood.

Current stats are:
DSLAM type / SW version:BDCM:0xa4a1 (164.161) / v0xa4a1
Modem/router firmware:  AnnexA version - A2pv6F039x6.d26a
DSL mode:               VDSL2 Profile 17a
Status:                 Showtime
Uptime:                  6 hours 23 min 42 sec
Resyncs:                12 (since 15 Apr 2020 08:59:10)

DownstreamUpstream
Line attenuation (dB):  26.90.0
Signal attenuation (dB):Not available on VDSL2
Connection speed (kbps):292397242
SNR margin (dB):        6.16.1
Power (dBm):            12.95.9
Interleave depth:       5731
INP:                    3.000
G.INP:                  Not enabledNot enabled
Vectoring status:       5 (VECT_UNCONFIGURED)

If all remains stable, I expect a few resyncs in coming days to reduce that huge interleave depth which i am guessing is there as a result of so many syncs and reboots recently.

So all i can say is "thank you Openreach." Sterling job. Lets hope it stays that way

ironically him wanting to stay out your house i think has led to a better service not the usual basic line test and "sorry you within spec"

[Chrysalis]

Huawei cabinet so the DLM reset has reverted the line from G.INP to Interleaving.

The Interleaving depth will drop to 40-50 when G.INP is enabled again.

Should give av but if a bump to the downstream too.

interesting its only circa 500 on hauwei interleaving vs 1000+ on eci?

[tiffy]

@Weaver:

@tiffy I have found my ISP (Andrews and Arnold- AA) is very good at getting Openreach going on my behalf. I have had two faults recently but have not even needed an engineer to come into the house. They used to sometimes come in and take measurements but I wonder if they are maybe just skipping those anyway now, so that they can get on with their jobs and do safely.

I have absolutely no doubt that AA would offer better service & backup when required than Plusnet.
After updating my Plusnet support ticket on Wednesday to the effect that I believed my issue was resolved, had a call back from PN yesterday who were eager to claim credit for the fix and were more concerned that the ticket should be closed out to that effect than interested in the actual solution achieved, no thanks to them.

I did try to get an answer as to why BT could still dispatch OR to customer faults but PN could not, advised that he could not comment on other ISP's policies and had to adhere to the current PN policy, this can now be seen on the PN website.

As stated previously, have been a Plusnet patron for 11 years without any major issues until approx. 18 months ago when the billing, contract dates issue started, this is still unresolved, however, always had faith in their tech. support so remained.
Contracted and line rental paid until December, then I'am off.
Will review available ISP offers at that time assuming survival having learned that package cost is not everything !