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[kazaroth]

Heya,

Easiest thing is to direct you to a thread I created on the O2 forums:
http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Home-Broadband-Home-Phone/Consistently-SLOW-broadband-3-5-MB-1200m-from-exchange/td-p/222481

That explains the full details.

In short(er): we get terrible ADSL speeds in the flat (we own).
Every socket has only one wire coming into it so there is no master (though we have a NTE5 faceplate on one).

We asked to see where the phone lines come in to the building are were simply shown this room:


Also:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/589791/bt2.jpeg

So it seems like we're in a building that's been really badly wired up, and have been somehow star wired from the room shown (even then, that doesn't make total sense, there must be a place the wire goes BEFORE it splits to the 5 sockets in our flat?) ?

My questions are:
1.) How can we get a professional BT guy to come and assess the situation?
2.) What are our options (given the worst case that everything is great up to our building but totally shoddy inside it?)
3.) If we were to pay to get a new line installed, is there any way for this to bypass the total mess shown above and come through to a new master socket in our flat?

Any/all/other suggestions welcome!

EDIT: fixed pertinent broken image.

[.Griff.]

That is one messy DP!

My first call would be to the management company responsible for the building/development and put the onus on them to get someone out however that's probably a lot easier said than done.

Low speeds aside do you experience any noise during calls? If so that's probably the easier avenue to go down and get a PTSN engineer out to inspect the D side and DP.

[burakkucat]

Hi kazaroth and welcome to the Kitz fora.

I like looking at pictures. Your first one had me feeling somewhat queasy . . . until I realised that it had been rotated anticlockwise by 90 degrees!

With both the first and second images downloaded and in the correct orientation I can definitely say that all equipment and wiring in the second picture are television related and are on the left-hand wall seen in the first picture.

The feature of interest is the pale grey box on the right-hand wall of the first picture. That is the telephony distribution point for the building. Reading the markings thereon, I deduce that there are either 40 properties (flats) within the building (Cable Pairs T41 - T80) or provision has been made for a total of 40 EO (exchange only) lines to the building and, within the Openreach records, that box is known as Distribution Point 2732.

One of those off-white cables is the feed for the service to your flat. I suspect that somewhere in your flat -- hidden in the back of a cupboard, perhaps -- will be a junction box and it will be from that junction box that the "star" wiring radiates to the five sockets.

If you are prepared to pay the costs involved, you can have an Openreach engineer attend to rationalise the wiring for your flat. If you wish to have your flat's internal wiring re-made in the appropriate daisy-chain with a correctly installed NTE5/A then yes, it can be done. You will need to book such an engineering visit via your ISP and agree to pay the costs that will ultimately be invoiced.

[kazaroth]

Hey B-cat,

Thanks for the detailed response.
I have a bad feeling about finding the junction box you suggest exists, but I will take a look tonight.

We don't use ANY of the other sockets, so theoretically, could I take it apart and try connecting a loose faceplate to the wire coming into the flat and see what speeds we get then?

Secondly, if we were to want to pay for a second line to be installed, what would the process be (physically), given the setup you've seen in the pictures...?

Thanks again.

[burakkucat]

I like your experimental style. 

Yes, if you can identify where the service-feed cable enters your flat, you could carefully (for testing purposes) transplant a socket there to make some checks. Please be aware that every pair should be terminated with a resistor and capacitor in series and that is one of the purposes of the NTE5/A (master socket).

As for provisioning a second line, it really depends. Are there 40 flats in the building? If not, then there is the physical capability to run another line from DP2732 to your flat. How that will be done in practice depends upon the existing wiring. If the off-white cables are either two or three pair, then the second line might be run through it.

At the moment, it very much looks as if you need to physically find where the cable enters your flat. If you can locate it, then an Openreach engineer could disconnect the existing five sockets at that point and provision one (or two) lines from the pre-existing cable.

[kazaroth]

Ok, so I was wrong in some of my initial statements: I had foolishly believed (or understood incorrectly) some things my flatmate had told me about how the flat was wired.

Removing all our faceplates revealed the following:

All but one of them has TWO cables coming in and out.
The one with just one wire coming in had the NTE5 socket put on it by the BT engineer when we first moved in.
All the cabling looks (to me) like CAT5
All the sockets except the NTE5 are unbranded generic - one has the IDC type connectors, all the rest are screw.

The one with one cable coming in is NOT the 'real' master: quite the opposite- it's the last socket on the chain.

I disconnected the faceplates in various combinations to work out the order of connection.
Because I am a terrible experimenter, I also called O2 and got them to change my SNR margin to 6db (from 9).
Thus I simultaneously changed two variables

When they did this my speed immediately jumped to about 6Mb.
Then I moved the Router to the first socket in the chain (and left all but one of the other faceplates offline (they were hanging off the wall from my experiment, etc.) and got the speed up by doing that to 7Mb.

At this point I have no NTE5 in the loop (it's on that end socket which is now disconnected).
This gave us a decent speed (7Mb) but the connection was ropey. Sync was being maintained but the speed would drop to 100 kbps for a few seconds quite often and then pop back up again. In short: not everything was rosy.

So just now I moved the NTE5 from the end of the chain up to the first socket and disconnected the last remaining faceplate. Currently the connection genuinely terminates at the NTE5 - though of course it's still not a real master: it's a CAT5 cable coming in to that point that I'm using two of the six wires of (they used the blue as the main rails).

When I did this, the router sync speed jumped to just over 8Mb.
But I will now see whether this has solved the drop out issues.
If not, I think the next step is to have our SNR put back up to 9db unfortunately.

We don't use a landline at all so we can live with all the remaining sockets staying disconnected (though I know we could solve with an ADSL splitter faceplate if we wanted).

As you suggested, I looked thoroughly in our utility cupboard and CAN see what looks like the phone wires (and power and everything else) coming in there, but any goings on are hidden behind plasterboard and floorboards. I haven't the will to tear it all up and see what's really going on... yet.

So in summary:
Currently have one socket connected and am getting 8Mb sync (~7Mb speedtest.net results)
Had dropouts all yesterday but going to see if I've improved things
Am still gettings 45db attenuation even though I KNOW we are under 2km from the exchange (I double checked we are on the exchange I thought we were...) - have no idea how this could be?

I'll post the uptime + error seconds and things for your opinion once I've had some reasonable uptime on this new setup.

Further thoughts, opinions and insights welcome!

[waltergmw]

@ Kazaroth,

As you say there are only 6 wires in your incoming cable, that is probably telephone cable and not what is usually called cat 5 which has 8 wires or 4 twisted pairs.

Using the incoming pair in the first socket with the NTE 5 is likely to provide the best results.

Kind regards,
Walter

[kazaroth]

Duh. I'm an idiot, of course you're right about it not being CAT5, thanks.

I don't know exactly where the incoming cable is but I've done what you suggest as best I can already I think

[burakkucat]

A good result although, as you know, I am going to give you my best black look for changing two variables whilst performing the experiment! 

So you have identified the first socket in the daisy-chain and should be capable of transplanting the existing NTE5/A to that location and moving the "no name" secondary socket to the end of the chain.

Back at the relocated NTE5/A you can now do one of two things:

(1) Leave the feed to the extensions disconnected but accessible to anyone who removes the lower front faceplate. (The easiest option.)
(2) Purchase a SSFP and install it at the NTE5/A, thus having a centralised filter and four telephony-only extension sockets.

Which would I choose? The latter. 

If it is possible, I would suggest that you leave the modem/router disconnected from the line for a full 24 hours. Then, during the next 1000 - 1400 hours window, reconnect it and power it up. From that time onwards, no "fiddling" -- regardless of how tempting it may be! 

Make use of your Internet connection but regard the next few days as its settling-in phase. Remember no powering off, no rebooting of the modem/router. 

Also, consider installing a copy of John Owen's Routerstats, to record a few days worth of statistics regarding your line's behaviour. Only after considering the graphs for some successive days may further potential be discovered. 

[kazaroth]

Heya,

Thanks for all that again

Being offline for 24h will be difficult but I'll try to persuade my flatmates. Is it ok to do this during next week rather than immediately?
What's the significance of that 24h off time and of the 10-1400 reconnection window?

I already have routerstats installed as of yesterday and running.

As far as I can tell, even the full version only graphs Noise Margin and Sync Speed?
The Noise Margin is fluctuating around the 6db target but not sure what that will tell me?
The Sync Speed is completely fixed - I thought it only changed if the Router actually dropped the line and had to re-sync?

Is there anything else interesting I can get from routerstats? Or any interpretation advice you can offer?

Cheers!  8)

[burakkucat]

Being offline for 24h will be difficult but I'll try to persuade my flatmates. Is it ok to do this during next week rather than immediately?

That's just a little "trick" I discovered. It just allows the DSLAM / MSAN sufficient time to attempt to "forget" about your line. If its not possible to do, then that won't really be a problem.

At this time of the year, RFI from extraneous sources will be at a minimum in the 1000 - 1400 hours window. So a reconnection (or a re-sync) within that period will allow the connection to be made at the highest sync speed possible.

As far as I can tell, even the full version only graphs Noise Margin and Sync Speed?
The Noise Margin is fluctuating around the 6db target but not sure what that will tell me?
The Sync Speed is completely fixed - I thought it only changed if the Router actually dropped the line and had to re-sync?

I thought one could obtain other data from the full version of Routerstats . . .    I know that Routerstats Lite (I hate that American spelling!) will only record SNRM and Sync Speed. Perhaps it is that version you have installed? 

Confession. As I am not a user of the Redmond Company's OS ('Doze), I do not use either version of Routerstats but have my own utility (Modemstats) monitoring my line.

So, for general comments about Routerstats, what it can log, how to use it, etc, I think it will be best for other members to give you that advice.

[Oranged]

Routerstats 6.7g is the latest version and records, on O2 graphically, US+DS SNRM; US+DS Sync Speed; Ping; Bitloading and in data format in Summary other stats including error count.

What that tells you is, when a disconn or other incident occurs, the status of the various parameters and probably what has caused the discon.