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Author Topic: Routerstats, noise and DECT phones  (Read 5019 times)

MikeS

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Routerstats, noise and DECT phones
« on: January 27, 2008, 09:51:55 PM »

Not too sure I've posted this in the right place, and I hope it doesn’t sound too much like a sermon.

I have had a line issue for many months which resulted in a lot of sync drops and consequent IP profile hammering (down to 125K).  After 4 engineer visits small improvements were made but the main problem was still there.  Part of the problem was that all I could tell the engineer’s was I was getting drops, although I only knew this because my ISP told me this, I didn’t notice them (apart from their impact on IP profile).   I had tried several routers / filters but  no real change to the problem.  It was extremely frustrating, was it the BT line, my ISP, my equipment I really didn’t know.

I started using a free program called Routerstats which records and graphs SN margin and sync speed for as long as you leave it running.  This showed very clearly that my line was good from 7pm to 3pm, after 3 pm it got progressively noisier and this is where all the resyncs occurred.  I tried several routers and, in summary, their behaviour over the noisy period was quite different, some handled it very well others were a disaster, and I could quantify the difference on the graphs.  This was a great help in reducing my frustration and pointing towards a solution.  The other big help was this forum.

I also noticed several 3dB drops in noise margin for varying periods, not a problem during the ‘good’ period but a probable resync in the bad period.  After a while it was clear that these were happening when the phone was being used.  I have a Siemens DECT phone.  Tried several micro filters and faceplate filters and again some showed no drop others a 3-4dB drop when the phone was used.  Without the noise margin monitoring I would have struggled to quantify this.

No I’m not related to the programmer, but I’m very grateful that he produced a tool which does allow you to measure the impact of equipment changes.  It has worked on all the routers I have tried. (Netgear, Dlink, Speedtouch, 2Wire).  It can be tedious checking out the impact of different equipment  but it is no where near as bad taking half an hour to download a few Windows updates because you are on a 250K profile.

I am on a longish line, attenuation 54dB, and it may well be that my line is very sensitive to small changes in the way equipment performs.   If you have a good stable line, you are lucky, however if you have a line like mine it may well be worth trying Routerstats to see if you can pinpoint reasons for the poor performance.

This is the link for the program

http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/internet/files.htm
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