I'm "kempshott" on MyDSLWebStats.
For many years our FTTC hasn't been great. Downstream slowly dropped from the original estimate of 32 mbps to 24-ish, but upstream has been really flaky, varying randomly from nearly 5 mbps at best, to under 1 mbps for weeks on end.
We've had more than a dozen BT engineers investigate over the years; they've blamed our distance from the cabinet (850m) aluminium wiring, REIN, RFI, split pairs - just about every excuse imaginable.
But yesterday, we finally got an engineer who seems to have sorted it out. He said he'd found "alternative routing" to the cabinet even though we'd been told on many occasions there were no spare pairs anywhere. Now we get a (so far stable):
Max: Upstream rate = 5420 Kbps, Downstream rate = 41996 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 5409 Kbps, Downstream rate = 36813 Kbps
(I'm on 40/10). G.INP is off following the DLM reset yesterday. So that's seems all good - maybe even TOO good considering our distance from the cabinet and 23dB line attenuation. The downstream interleave of 721 and the very high downstream FEC error rate of around 4000/min concern me.
It's only been 24 hours but does this look too good to be true?
Pleased you've got a result.
Unless you've ever carried out DSL/PSTN network engineering on a large scale, then you won't have an appreciation as to what an engineer faces ?? Simply passing off work done as '
Excuses' highlights the naivety of this.
Unfortunately, we don't have access to the previous engineers notes and actual work completed, and I'm not naïve enough myself to realise we do have poor engineers out there, but they are in the low percentages as opposed to high.
With that in mind, percentage-wise there's a bl00dy good chance you
have had a decent engineer, who hasn't been able to detect a fault at that particular time in history. Again, this can happen to the very best of engineers.
The 'Excuses' listed (Split-pairs, REIN, Ali cable etc etc), are
all symptomatic of DSL problems. The fact the engineer today found a 'Spare', but the other engineers couldn't ......... doesn't mean they were being lazy or incapable ...... it just means that today there happens to be a 'Spare'.
Distribution point (DP) capacity is forever changing, for example Mrs Smith who used to have 2 phone lines as she worked from home, now only has the 1 phone line as she's since left the company. That now means there is a 'Spare' line.
As I say, I'm pleased success has been found for you ...... but, for the new readership of this forum who may themselves have an issue, (lets face it, not many will be GOOGLING 'Broadband fault' if they haven't got one), I feel I need to balance the input so they aren't of the opinion most engineers make excuses and do little else.