Have you been able to see any consistency in the time of day its been happening?
You say its flats, does it have an elevator? Do the phone lines go anywhere near its control gear perhaps?
Have you checked with the neighbours to see if they have issues?
Does the phone line go internally through the communal section of the flats or along the outside wall?
Thank you both for your responses.
It's difficult to say about consistency. We used to get a disconnection at 12:57am almost every day, and now, since using Fritzbox instead of Draytek, I get a dip in SNR around that time. For the past 4 weeks, we've not had disconnections and so I thought the replacement of the motor in our boiler and our neighbours' had solved the issue. However, yesterday, we got a flurry of errors and today, too, which makes me think that the issue isn't resolved.
Last year was particularly bad and we'd get disconnections usually at 57 min before the hour at various times (but regularly at 12:57am) - so there was no specific pattern. At the time, I thought it was our Draytek. However, since doing more testing, I've discovered that Devolo homeplugs (1200) do contribute to errors on the line (ES only), despite having the 17a profile interoperability option, and so I've removed them.
From other symptoms, our phone will occasionally ping in the middle of the night. It's a single ping. Sometimes this ping would result in the disconnection, so that's how we also knew that the line would drop.
Openreach twice mentioned a high resistant fault (they thought it was something to do with jelly crimping), which showed on their readers, but because the fault is difficult to access (presumably underground), they can't do much about it. Plus, the area is due to get FTTP, so I presume they won't bother replacing old cables. So, the cable goes mainly underground, then onto the pole. We're about 500m away from the Exchange (Dalkeith). The thing is that we can have days/weeks of nothing and so I doubt it's really the high resistant fault that's causing our issues. Otherwise, how would you get a flurry of errors?
During the 12:57am disconnection, I listened to the tone of our phone, and what I can hear is something similar to what used to be old modem tone when connecting to the Internet. It's very short, though, lasting around a second or two, going higher in pitch at the end. I mentioned that to Openreach at the time, but they didn't comment. I should even have a recording of it somewhere.
Plusnet have capped our line at 55/10 and changed our profile to 'stable' (they called it 'super stable').
The building is an Edwardian two storey terraced building with no elevators (6 flats), with the remaining 4 being terraced townhouses, one of which is connected to our pole.
I've checked with the neighbours but since all are retired and non-technically minded, they don't care too much if they can't immediately access Alexa or Marks and Spencer's website.
In our flat, the tel. line goes along the skirting board (half the length of the sitting room), then through the wall and immediately to the pole across the street, which is a quiet residential street. 6 flats and 1 terraced townhouse are connected to the pole. Then, the line goes in the direction of two other streets with more terraced townhouses being connected to their respective poles.
Is there a way to hire a spectrum analyser? They look quite pricey.
Thank you.
