Hi Roy
I have a suspicion that I may know which checker Sam used that showed the capacitance figure. If its the LLU checker that I think it is (the mention of capacitance gave me the clue) .. then in my particular instance on my line it was more inaccurate than the crow flies one. (over 1km out).
This same particular checker when run on my parents line actually gave them a result of a line length nearer to the exchange than it could possibily physically be.
afaik only the BTw engineer line check can give you your figure, the rest are just guides. But sam does have more access to BTw stuff than I do.
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One of the possible things that you could do is request your ISP to send out a BT engineer to check your line. To get them to do this mention your line stat figures to them and the fact that you appear to be frequently loosing sync.
Theres 2 sides to this - one is that you may have an genuine fault on your line which could be fixed... or alternatively it could be the length of your line, in which case then BT may well downgrade it to 1Mb.
It is possible that you have a very varied and fluctuating SNR margin, this can and does happen - one of the guys on this forum sees the same thing.
Its good during certain times of the day, but can drop quite a bit at other times.
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The reason why you are getting 2 separate results from the BT checkers, is that the 2nd figure is using maxdsl, which uses different monitoring equipment than "traditional" adsl that has been around for the past few years and you are currently using now.
Its also able to kick in something called interleaving which can help recover errors on some lines.
I mentioned it in my post earlier, but theres more info about
maxdsl here.
It may be worthwhile discussing this with your ISP as an alternative.. but I must stress that before doing so, check that you have done all you can to stablise your account from your end first.
maxdsl isnt a magic cure.. it just gets the best it can from your line under varying circumstances. Therefore the better your line is to start with.. the higher speeds you will receive on it