Print

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

[lummers]

Thanks everyone for these replies, I appreciate the support!

Please see the results attached from:
(1) the BT Broadband Availability (I used the phone number to check),
(2) the router stats from the admin page


Given that I don't know anything about the history of the wiring in the home (I'm getting it second hand from my parents who got bits of it from the previous owners), I'm thinking it is best to try and arrange an engineer to come and take a proper assessment of the wiring, install the new face plate, etc.

I'm based close to Inverness in Scotland. Does anybody have any recommendations for folks? Or, is the best thing to do to request this from the ISP (SSE)?

----------------

Something called an "SNR reset" (downstream) will reset this figure back to normal which should be 6 dB downstream. That will make it spectacularly faster unless for some reason the ISP is limiting the soeed but that doesn’t look likely in this case.

Thank you, Weaver! This at least gives me something to research into and speak to the ISP about.

I am somewhat puzzled by what can be seen in the above image....The final mystery is why a five pair service feed (or lead-in) was initially installed. I can only just speculate . . . 

Thank you, burakkucat! This was helpful! What would you recommend that I do here to 'correct' the wiring? This sounds like something that a telecom engineer would need to take a proper look at?

An "extension" phone has been mentioned, we need an explanation of how that is wired in. If it's via that green pair in the 6-core cable that's VERY weird!

I think this is how it has been done. I will take a closer look tomorrow and also check how the old phone sockets in the other rooms in the house (not being used) are wired.

Do you have more than one phone line into the house?

No, there's only one phone line into the house. There are other phone sockets in other rooms in the house - but my parents are adamant there's only one phone line into the house (my original image) and it was internally extended to those other phone sockets.

[dee.jay]

I have never seen a 2Mbps VDSL estimate

That is desperately poor.

[g3uiss]

But the ADSL2 estimates is what the OP is getting so perhaps that’s as good as it gets.

[HPsauce]

I think you'd be better off initially getting a local broadband and phone wiring competent IT person to look at it, assuming you can find one.
It looks like you need someone to figure out what you have, understand what you want/need and reconfigure appropriately.

Your ISP will just get a BT Openreach engineer out and quite probably land you with a big bill, unless you can show a fault first........ and they won't be very, or at all, interested in your extension wiring, probably just disconnect it, regularise the master socket and say it's fine now!

And I don't know how skill sets work near you, but round here electricians generally know sweet FA about correct phone wiring, especially for broadband.

[HPsauce]

But the ADSL2 estimates is what the OP is getting so perhaps that’s as good as it gets.

They're horribly conservative. Checking my line it says "Up to 6" and range 4 to 8, yet it has been running cleanly for many many years at just over 20mbps!

[HPsauce]

An alternative approach, if you feel competent to sort out the extension wiring yourself (with advice from here?) is to contact the ISP, tell them the master socket appears to be wired incorrectly resulting in really bad broadband speeds, and get an engineer out.
BUT first, plug a phone into the master socket and check it works, and dial 17070 to check it's the right number!

Extension wiring is really pretty simple, there's a specific place to safely connect on a master socket - NOT how it is currently! Maybe even do that first?

[dee.jay]

They're horribly conservative. Checking my line it says "Up to 6" and range 4 to 8, yet it has been running cleanly for many many years at just over 20mbps!

That's a good point - I used to get ADSL2+ @ 16Mbps with Sky (They never did 24Mbps) - and that was as fast as it went - my estimate is 7 - so there's credence to this statement!

[burakkucat]

Perhaps look in the classified advertisements of a local newspaper (or other publication) for an ex-BT/ex-Openreach person who would be willing and able to sort it out? 

There are many competent members who could resolve the problem; unfortunately no one is local to Inverness. (To the best of my knowledge.)

[stevebrass]

Might it be worth plugging the hub into the extension socket?

[dee.jay]

Perhaps look in the classified advertisements of a local newspaper (or other publication) for an ex-BT/ex-Openreach person who would be willing and able to sort it out? 

There are many competent members who could resolve the problem; unfortunately no one is local to Inverness. (To the best of my knowledge.)

Would be more than happy to help. Alas, I’m in Wales.

[HPsauce]

Thanks everyone for these replies, I appreciate the support!

Any updates for us, it's been a week?

[Weaver]

lumbers, I’ve noticed that you are getting errors in Zoom. In my experience with Zoom and my ultra-long lines here in Skye, Zoom cannot cope with any kind of data corruption errors. I’m not certain about this, so the following may be wrong. I think that Zoom does not itself correct errors by resending lost or corrupted packets. Again, not at all sure about this, but it’s the best explanation for the behaviour I’ve seen. Most other internet programs use some software called TCP which lives (only) in the communicating computers at the two ends of the whole path and corrects for errors by retransmitting packets, and so an application that uses TCP continues to work and makes even a bad link look apparently ok by covering up corruption. Web browsing and email use TCP so that given that this is the bulk of the average home user’s experience many users don’t even know that they have a bad line. I think that a link has to be error-free in order to use Zoom successfully, again, no proof of this. Some sorts of live streaming internet TV (not Netflix or Amazon, BBC or ITV or Youtube) used to (or maybe still do) similarly require an error-free line.

I was saying before that your downstream SNR figure is way too high, suspiciously so, and it would be good to recheck the numbers. Also I may have misunderstood the slightly odd terminology that they’re using. It was this line:
    Noise Margin: 6.5 dB, Down: 29.6 dB

But whatever the downstream SNR figure turns out to be, I was saying that reducing it to the normal 6 dB would make the line much faster. While this is true, doing so would make it less reliable and that’s the last thing you need for Zoom. The rule is : high SNR figure: slow speed, high reliability; low SNR figure: high speed, bad reliability. If your SNR is too high, then it has probably been raised because the line was very unreliable and raising it (high enough) will fix the problem. There is a limit to how high you can raise it though and if it can’t good high enough then your line is stuffed and needs repair. But I’m suspicious about that number, 29.6 dB, because I’ve never seen a line like yours at more than 15 dB downstream SNRM.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Zoom cannot cope with any kind of data corruption errors.

AFAIK all real-time video and audio services work that way, as you don't want to end up with there being a 30 second delay between when you speak and when the other end gets that's data, and out-of-order packets are worthless.  Keeping that latency low is priority.

The codecs used do have some level of redundancy that allows each end to guess what should be there (eg reconstruct a lower quality version of the image), thus picture and audio quality reduces but only drops out entirely if a lot of packets are missing.

[Weaver]

Alex, is it possible to treat audio and video differently ? Since audio is such a low bitrate compared to video, you could send multiple copies of very small chunks of the audio. (I was just reading about a protocol that does exactly this, I forget what, but multiple copies were optionally sent as long as you didn’t mind a hugely reduced effective throughput.)