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Author Topic: Broadband Troubles  (Read 22065 times)

kitz

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #60 on: November 16, 2014, 10:34:28 PM »

Sorry I cant find the convo...  I think it must have been personal mail via my ipad, rather than site mail..  in which case I wont have a copy. :(

I have however found this thread, which touches on the subject of ASSIA, cutting back power, and how it was restricting the very good lines to speeds below their true capacity.  The bit half way down makes interesting reading.
What we do know for sure now though is that Sky most definitely does not use the same DLM as BT.   It works backwards and because of this its why some lines were getting stuck and never reaching their full potential.
http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=10975.0
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kitz

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #61 on: November 16, 2014, 11:06:49 PM »

Sorry for answering myself again.   But after having re-read that thread..  IF that bug still applies to Skys DLM, and if its still affecting the occasional short line.. then I think we may have found what your problem is.

See how snadge mentions seeing a line what should run at 22Mbps ending up at 13Mbps and quote "what about 20Mb lines that end up at 16Mb"   Sound familiar?

As I mentioned several posts back,  a very low power output will make the line more susceptible to interference and noise.  The signal is weaker so errors that a full strength line can cope with are more likely to materialise.  I suspect that you may well have had the wiring issue for a while.. but it only became apparent now because you're not running at full pelt.

I'd love to know if Rizla knows if that bug ever got fixed.  He's probably the best man to answer as it was him that discovered the bug in the first place.  Unfortunately he often works away/abroad so may not pick up on this for a while..  but I'll try contacting him later via other means.
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karmie

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #62 on: November 18, 2014, 10:29:02 AM »

Hi again

Line has had an uptime of over 2 days and 9 hours with a 24 hour average of: 0 FEC/HEC/ES and downstream CRC errors of 5.45 per day / upstream CRC of 3.23 per day. Seems like a drastic improvement and in its current condition I would say I am perfectly happy with how it is currently operating.

Kitz - I think your estimation is spot on with regards to the output power and Sky. I completely agree the internal wiring here was evidently always not great but it only became evident upon the swapover to Sky and lower power output as we had been running fine for nearly 5 years. I think it is absolutely shocking that they are trying to save money to that degree by causing other people misery and most importantly in some circumstances having customers PAY out their own pockets believing and being told their lines are at fault when in reality a stronger signal would allow the service to operate even under suboptimal conditions. As a test I did plug in the SKY SR102 in an attempt to extract output power data from it but was only presented with these statistics:

Broadband Link     Downstream     Upstream
Connection Speed    16383 kbps    1031 kbps
Line Attenuation    14.0 dB    7.0 dB
Noise Margin    10.5 dB    7.5 dB

Perhaps there is a way to extract further information from the SR102 but presently I plan on remaining with the Bebox and perhaps giving Sky a ring to ask them to manually reprofile the target SNR which may allow slightly higher sync speeds? I don't believe the small amount of erroring or fluctuations on the SNRM would present any problems if the line were to sync at a higher rate (provided it is not being restricted by the output power issue.) I would no longer consider this a pressing matter though as a small downstream/upstream increase would merely be the icing on the cake as the main goal was to have a stable fastpath line which I *believe* we now have :-)

Thank you all so much for the excellent advice presented over this thread I was completely fed up of playing ping pong with Sky and BT and was ready to just cave in and get a new line installed with a new provider. I should have known something was up when they cut the price we were paying with BE* (20 odd quid a month) down to £7.50 - with Sky you definitely get what you pay for..
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burakkucat

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #63 on: November 18, 2014, 08:41:35 PM »

Without reviewing all the previous posts to this thread, I suspect that your line will now behave with a target SNRM of 6 dB.
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kitz

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #64 on: November 22, 2014, 06:29:16 PM »

Ive not been around for a few days, so only just picking up on this now, but from all the symptoms it does look like this is what happened to you.  I cant think of anything else that would make as much sense.

The line certainly seems in much better condition now, and asking them to re profile the target SNR seems like a good move.
Unfortunately it turned out I never got chance to contact rizla before I went AWOL, but I have now pointed out this thread to him and Im sure that if he has anything of value to add, then when he has time he will do so.   
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guest

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #65 on: November 23, 2014, 09:06:46 AM »

AFAIK the DLM "sticking" is no longer a widespread issue, in fact Sky's DLM is now pretty much top notch these days (much MUCH better than BTs). The offending module in the ASSIA suite has long since been replaced (best part of 18 months ago when they trialled g.INP) and Sky's DLM is now pretty aggressive in terms of maxing out lines.

As the OP moved from Be and is now (presumably) on BB unlimited then he will be (should be) talking to exactly the same people he was at Be - the Bulgarians run the support seperately for "Broadband Pro", which is defined as either the 80/20 VDSL2 service or the BB unlimited service for ex-Be users so I don't see where the moaning about them is coming from. Personally I found the Bulgarians to be bloody useless but the OPs support hasn't changed at all so I dunno what the issue is there.

NB ex-O2 and "normal" BB unlimited customers don't get the "premium" support and have to make do with normal Sky support.

The problem is that there is no way to manually set a profile and have it "stick" these days - DLM cannot be stopped on a single line, the module doesn't work that way so if the OP wants the line to max out (after whatever issues he's had) then he's just going to have to wait a bit. If the error counts are accurate then DLM will drop the margin to 3dB and rely on g.INP to sort out transient issues. If not then it'll probably settle at 7dB.

YMMV but I've found Sky to be better than Be in just about every way - not having to put up with Telefonica's shonky bargain basement routing was (and is) a big plus. In addition, unlike BT Retail/Plusnet Sky has decent peering and doesn't just rely on L3 to do everything ;)
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kitz

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #66 on: November 23, 2014, 03:43:55 PM »

Thanks for the input Rizla... 

... and as always, you and I will continue to agree to disagree re BE support and Skys DLM  ;D
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guest

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Re: Broadband Troubles
« Reply #67 on: November 24, 2014, 01:26:13 PM »

You wouldn't disagree about the DLM if you saw how it worked on my line :D I think snadge got 3-4Mbps extra with it too. Seriously good with the g.INP module kitz, really is.

I just found that when you had a specific issue and could demonstrate it at will (like Telefonica's shonky routing) the Bulgarians would be more interested in how it looked on the forums rather than addressing the issue. No real difference from the (pre-Telefonica) days when Brett was in charge - all about image, not much substance IMHO. I wasn't best pleased to see them becoming my "support" again on Sky and told them that in no uncertain fashion :)

For me the top 5 ISPs I've had (in descending order) are :

1) UK Online (Easynet) by a country mile - one issue sorted by Easynet escalations (Dan the man);
2) AAISP - expensive as hell but no muppets/scripts anywhere;
3) Sky - on the three occasions I've had to contact tech support (DLM stuck/VDSL self-install fault/problem with Sky TV box) they've been fine. Admittedly I phone them during the day so YMMV;
4) Zen - despite being robbed (CC fraud) by one of their staff & them totally ignoring their own complaints procedure (twice) they were reliable;
5) Be - awful both times although slightly less awful the second time. I had more tickets open with Be than with all the other mentioned ISPs put together  ::)
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