Print

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

[Weaver]

Using my new stats-summary tool, I’ve noticed that line 3 upstream is giving ES, more than 60 per hour. I looked at the graph on clueless.aa.net.uk, and I can see red for packet loss, so called “dripping blood”. I resynched the modem and the upstream speed dropped to ~184kbps [!!] Before this it was just under 400k u/s.

This is not good; the line is contributing very little to the total upstream combined speed and I need all the upstream I can get. We’re getting down towards dial-up speeds; well, ISDN anyway. Wonder why its speed has suddenly halved? Its SNRM is around 6dB, as it should be. It hasn’t gone through the roof. Downstream is ok. I have asked AA for some advice.

When I first saw the errors, I first tried increasing the upstream target SNRM to 9dB instead of 6. This of course made it even slower, something like 128kbps, I forget exactly, and it connected at just over 10dB SNRM.

[burakkucat]

b*cat reads . . . but has nothing about which to write. 

[Weaver]

I’m still getting a few ES on line 3 upstream even at an SNRM u/s of 9.6 dB, and that’s down to 158kbps upstream sync rate !

[Weaver]

Not surprisingly AA has said that there’s nothing they can do, after spending some time looking into it. They have asked me to do a quiet line test.

[Weaver]

Line 3 upstream went down to 120 kbps and has since risen to 240kbps, but on Sunday night it was back to normal at 389k u/s, until it dropped the connection today (Monday), and that’s when the speed dropped once again ti what it is now.

[burakkucat]

 

[Weaver]

I am seriously thinking of getting rid of line 3 and getting a replacement line, but the most important thing is not to get back the exact same pair that I got before, so I would need to order an additional line first and then cease this line. What do you think? I would have to talk this through with AA of course.

[burakkucat]

I am seriously thinking of getting rid of line 3 and getting a replacement line, but the most important thing is not to get back the exact same pair that I got before, so I would need to order an additional line first and then cease this line. What do you think?

Logically, yes, that would work. However, given your location and what would be required to provide another pair for yet another circuit, Openreach may decline to accept the order.

I would have to talk this through with AA of course.

Yes, see what A&A think.

[Weaver]

> may decline to accept the order.

Indeed, I had thought just that. And it also means all the unnecessary work of running a third drop cable out from the poles.


I’m getting packet loss now with this line (line 3). This is not good at all, so have informed AA. See:


In the snapshot above, the line status is red (down) currently because I had just forced a resync, in order to try and restore stability, and the link had not come back up yet.

It seems that all the problems are to do with data corruption in the upstream path of line 3; the following is downstream | upstream, note the ES counts for the period since the link came up:

Since Link time = 2 hours 3 min 55 sec
FEC:      304      35673
CRC:      19      2184
ES:      10      481
SES:      0      36
UAS:      0      0
LOS:      0      0
LOF:      0      0
LOM:      0      0

Is ~233 ES per hour very bad news ? Seems to me that it is not good. Both downstream and upstream are set to a 6dB target SNRM. The presence of PhyR L2retx is presumably keeping the uncorrected error counts so very low compared to the upstream.

[jelv]

How much is it costing you per month in total for this sub-standard service?

[Weaver]

Not sure, I’d have to check. Unsure about figures including or not including the copper line ‘line rental’ (which goes to AA, not to BT or OR) and not sure about VAT, but I’m guessing £30 pm very roughly. I buy data separately; it’s independent of how many lines I have on this old ‘units’ tariff.

It all went badly wrong at the start of last year, with repeat faults that never got properly fixed, just temporary fixes that no-one understands. It would need someone from OR with a huge brain and a lifetime of experience on the problem to get it thoroughly sorted out. One problem is that AA does not get back sufficiently detailed info from the engineers in their notes- mind you, they engineers have not known how they fixed the problems anyway, so that doesn’t help matters.

[jelv]

I meant all in including line rental. I was guessing it must be somewhere around £100.

[jelv]

Something to consider in the future. From what I've seen their latency is going to be perfectly acceptable.

[Weaver]

All in, inc VAT it will be £30-40 pm. It’s not even close to £100. :-) And my other costs that are not per-line are: download units (varies), email, renewal of lots of domain names and costs of 4G data SIMs per month. A lot of very small items.

[jelv]

Surely four times line rental is approaching £50 before you add the ADSL?