Yep, though he said it was quite common, though I don't know whether he meant with Sonos or speakers. It was also astonishing how regularised people's lives are: you get up, put something on at the socket, even though you don't necessarily want to use it. So, every time it was switched on and off at the socket, my internet would drop. Every time it was on, there'd be noise and depending on how much bandwidth we would use, there would be drops, too. Plus, they only said it was at a place along the road (but didn't specify the direction), so if I think where it is, there's a pole by that property (literary a couple of feet), which would mean that lots would have been affected. Crazy.
I think it is a widespread problem and people just don't realise it, especially in places where there are older residents who are used to using something and have no desire to upgrade to the latest technology, unless the thing breaks. Very few will even know how to check stats on your router, and will use the connection for light browsing and email only. I myself didn't know much about electrical noise until I started reading about it.
Also, how do you speak to your neighbours that you'd want them to check their appliances: a) they don't know how; and b) you imply that it's their appliances that are the issue. I suspect, this Sonos speaker would go undetected if I hadn't pressed for another Openreach visit and was determined not to give up, despite being told on here that I'm moaning about a few errors. Thankfully, according to the REIN engineer, it was easy to find the source of this noise in this area as it was on at the time and no flats around.
Another issue was convincing Plusnet and Openreach that it was indeed an external source that caused our problems. I'm used to looking at data and spotting patterns to realise certain things. However, Plusnet will side with what Openreach will say (obviously, as it's their network and their specialist engineers), so it took a while to convince Plusnet to keep the job open, as they'd test the line in the evenings, when I would usually phone, and the answer would be that *at this moment in time* there were no issues. It was only when that wonderful engineer stated it was a brick wall job and that the issue would be affecting others, too, that things changed - so, I'll be eternally grateful to him for that. Then Openreach are confident that it's not their network, so they focussed on 'customer premises' a lot (my master socket was changed five times in the end! The last two being done by the REIN engineer, as he was getting FEC errors at the socket, but not on the line. My g.fast plate fitted by another engineer just two weeks ago is now gone and I now again have Openreach's standard VDSL socket), which I knew wasn't the cause of our issues because we had tested everything on multiple occasions. Finally, if you don't get a dedicated rep from your ISP that will look after your case, not all that pick up the job will look over months of notes - on at least two occasions I had to phone them to stop being sent yet another router because they just order them without even asking if you want another one. Absolutely crazy.
You should check, Alex, the times you observe this reduction in speed, if you can be bothered, as one of our problems was the 2.4GHz network was unusable, despite me using a different channel and not many routers being around. I initially thought it was Draytek's
cheap components, as my 2830 and 2762 were both affected (on both ADSL and VDSL), but then when I noticed that with my Fritzbox too, I realised it was an external source.
