Hi Kitz
Alls thats happened is FTTC has pushed more lines to their limit, but as an offset putting DSLAMs out in the field it will have shortened a hell of a lot of line lengths. It's a no brainer that Openreach probably do have more faults reported than the 'adsl days', but there are a heck of a lot more people who now have broadband.
For me personally, it is the impact of crosstalk which I've found the most surprising. From a max rate of 112 down to 65Mb or less if interleaved... and I wasn't even first on the cab. I can understand some people being confused why they've lost say 20Mbps of speed.
Cross-talk is evil and xDSL for me, you and many I suspect only gets worse with time. ADSL MAX I saw a continual reduction in SNR margin, then the same on ADSL2+ which reduced my sync speed from around 18 to around 12, and with that reduction saw the connection less reliable with random resync's every few days sometimes, and always at the wrong time!
Moving to VDSL, second on the cab at a previous address was 80/20 with 12db SNR, great I thought, but after a couple of years SNR had reduced to ~6db (could have been a lot worse I guess), I moved before it started to impact sync speeds but again reliability was already affected. A similar story at a new address despite VDSL having been around for a good few years before I arrived, so I thought any crosstalk would already be there and so it wouldn't really be a changing picture, but no, margin has dropped bit by bit over 3 years or so, along with reliability. So I think a lot of people are still on ADSL but slowly moving over to VDSL and that is all adding more crosstalk.
Thankfully been able to move to FTTP and leave all that behind me, it feels great not needing to keep on eye on modem stats or seeing an Openreach bod at the PCP and wondering if that's a new VDSL connection and am I going to see a sudden speed reduction along with less margin to ride any REIN events. Let it thunder all it likes now!
Regards
Phil
