Print

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

[Victor]

Hello, this is my first post on Kitz, expressing appreciation of the information on here.

I'd had intermittent noise on my phone line and internet drop out for a few years, becoming more annoying recently.  A few years ago a BTOR engineer visited but didn't find any problem.  I'd held off getting anyone back till recently and wanted to make sure there wasn't anything wrong with my side of things first, not  least to avoid call out charges.  My phone is with BT and internet now with Plusnet.  I think my line length is about 2km as attenuation is 12/24dB.

I downloaded DSLstats to monitor my router stats and could see bursts of noise several times a day, varying intensity and lasting from a few minutes to a couple of hours, then the line would return to normal (see attachment).

I tried running my modem on ADSL1 as there's a higher noise margin, but the internet still cut out, but perhaps not so frequently.

I reported this as a voice fault with BT, when you dial 151 you get through to India rather than someone in your local exchange like happened in the old days.  I had to phone them three times, I won't bore you with the details but they eventually agreed to make an engineer's appointment as long as I agreed to a £ 130 charge if the fault was inside my property. 

Very fortunately things got a lot better at that point as the BTOR guy turned up as expected and was quite thorough, finding that the cable between a manhole cover in my street and a cabinet in an adjacent street was faulty so connected me to another pair.  So thanks to him and thanks to the information on this site. 

[roseway]

Congratulations on your success. Did the  engineer reset your connection after the repair? You had a very high downstream SNRM at the time of your snapshot, so a reset should have resulted in a higher speed.

[Black Sheep]

Congratulations on your success. Did the  engineer reset your connection after the repair? You had a very high downstream SNRM at the time of your snapshot, so a reset should have resulted in a higher speed.

If it was a 'Voice' fault ........... the chances are the circuit would not have been reset. A phone call to the ISP should see this corrected. 

[konrado5]

Could you attach your Hlog and QLN ? I am very curious.

Best regards
konrado5

[Victor]

Thanks for your replies. 

No, the connection hasn't yet been reset.  I'll see if the speed will gradually increase by itself, if it doesn't I'll get on to Plusnet.  At the moment the download speed is stuck at 6648 kHz, but the noise margin is gradually rising, it was about 7dB and is now 9.5.  They are nice straight red lines on the SNR graph.  My neighbour, who has a similar setup gets 11576 kHz, so anticipate I'll get this sort of speed.

The SNM graph I posted above was taken when it was faulty and I'd switched the modem to ADSL1 from ADSL2+ so the noise margin is very high (18dB).  I'm now back on ADSL2+. 

Konrado5, sorry but Hlog and QLN are not available as I've got a Thomson TG585 v8.  But I think I know what you're thinking, that it might be REIN/RF interference, which is what I thought it might have been, and even tried an RF3 filter temporarily. The intermittent crackling and noise was there even with the modem switched off but often when you went into the test socket you couldn't hear it but once or twice I did, at a low level.  There's no Medium Wave interference I could detect and the disturbances seemed to occur at any time of day or night.  I also sometimes connected the modem directly to the test socket and the fault was still there so it wasn't the filters, which I'd changed and upgraded to the Mk2 faceplate type.  Fortunately the BTOR guy said he could detect there was something wrong with the line with his portable tester, even though the noise was not there much and the internet was holding up at the time.

I'm attaching the Tones graph since I don't have Hlog and QLN, there's a gap at the higher tones but my neighbour's line is worse as his highest one is 450.  It's taken today, after the fault was rectified but looked similar beforehand.

Perhaps in the future I'll get FTTC but as I'm the sole user of the connection and not a gamer I don't need the bandwidth, reliability is more important than absolute speed.  I use the internet for web browsing, occasional iPlayer, and occasional downloads of files when I'm playing with my computers and Raspberry Pi.