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[coolsnakeman]

Hey wildy. Yeah that is a ticket id for CST be sure to keep that safe and don't loose it. I could of helped you a bit more if CST had of still been in belfast but they shifted it back out again a couple of days ago so you will be dealing with shepton. The estimated line distance is wrong they got mine wrong when i was with them saying i was 1.7Km when in actually fact i am 3.8Km! Stick with the results you have got. Keep pushing them for an SFI engineer and be sure to tell them EVERYTHING you have done and don't miss one bit of detail cause that small bit of detail can throw them off making them think of a different scenario. Good luck and keep us posted.

Regards
Gary

P.S I have actually got a contact in shepton i could kindly ask to check your ticket id for you and see what he can do.

[Wildy]

Just had my call-back from Sky, since a restart this morning the line has been ok (at least by Sky's standards, they don't want to accept this line can go faster than 1.5 meg). I mentioned that last night had been much worse, with disconnects and slow speeds, and after looking at it the guy said there was some build up of errors on the line.

So I am now awaiting a new Sky router, not sure that this will help anything but at least if the problem persists it's another thing ruled out and another step closer to getting sorted.

@Gary Thanks for the kind offer but I reckon there's not much else to do but wait for now 

[coolsnakeman]

They should beable to see from your SNRM thats your line should beable to acheive faster as it is high enough for more room but sometimes those guys don't think of it that way they look at a high attenuation and automatically think "slow speed" lol.  Have you not already tried with another router? You can plug a 3rd party router in just to see if it syncs any higher but it won't log in sky don't mind you doing that as long as your not flashing the router to obtain the username and password. You should get back onto the phone to them and tell them you have already connected a 3rd party router and found it is still not syncing any higher and demonstrate it to them over the phone by plugging 1 router in at a time so they can see for themselves that replacing your router was a waste of time.

Regards
Gary

[Wildy]

Yeah they already know I've used a 2nd router, but because it's from before we had Sky, they reckon it's old and want me to try with a new one.

Just to add a bit more confusion to the story, Dad had asked my uncle who works for BT if he could find the line length for our house. I know this is a bit vague because I got the info second hand but he came back with a line length of 5.7km. I suppose that's possible if they went through the next town over then back to us, but then I can't understand how we've got such low attenuation.  Is there any way of finding out for sure the actual route of my phone line?

[sevenlayermuddle]

Wildy,

Correct me if I'm wrong but, judging from recent posts, your connection speed is no longer fixed, it seems to vary with each reconnect?  That would indicate you are back on an adaptive rate.

I assume Sky's DLM will still use a 'target margin' feature similar to BT's DLM, in which case it would be nice to know what your target margin is set to.   The interesting parameters would be the connection speed, and the SNRM, immediately after a reconnect.

As for line length & attenuation, different routers will report different figures for attenuation, it's only approximate, and that's normal.  However, there usually within a couple of dB difference one to another, and not nearly enough to explain a 5.7km line being reported as 55dB.  A 5.7km line would normally equate to nearly 80dB and you'd be lucky to get any DSL at all.   It'll be interesting to see if the new router also reports 55dB but, if it does, I'd just disregard that 5.7km figure.

- 7LM

[Wildy]

OK, restarted this morning, can't remember the exact sync rate but it was low 1200's noise margin 9db.

Tonight has been a bad one but at least proves I'm not on a fixed rate anymore (I think), as you can see from the attached graphs the noise knocked me off a couple of times but resynced at a lower rate each time.  Made a right mess of my bitloading graph too 


[attachment deleted by admin]

[sevenlayermuddle]

Hi Wildy,

Yes - it proves you're not on a fixed rate.

What also worries me is that the line is connecting circa 1200 with a 9dB margin.  With a 6dB margin instead of 9, you would only gain maybe another 400-800 kbps, so that may the basis of Sky's argument for saying that your line's only good for 1500.  They're being slightly pessimistic, but not hugely so.

That leaves the interesting question of why your line, with 55dB attenuation, behaves so much more less good than most similar lines.  I think you already said the test socket didn't improve things, which seems to suggest three possibilities (1) the router knackered, or (2) an external wiring fault, or (3) very strong interference.

I know that only repeats what's been said already and doesn't maybe help you a lot.  I guess the next step is to try that new router, you never know - there's an outside chance it'll improve things massively,  but don't pin you hopes on that.  Otherwise, it'll at least confirm (or not) that the attenuation is 55dB-ish, which would give you more ammo' to plead with Sky to look at it more closely.

I don't know if anybody else may have comments on the latest routerstats graphs... it's interesting the way there seems to a a progressive SNRM decay after each rescyn?

[coolsnakeman]

Just so you know sky have 3 target SNRM's. They are as follows: 7db, 9db and 12db. However they are able to use another system for lower SNRM targets such as 3db but its very rare they do this. If the new router doesn't make an such improvements then you are entitled to request an engineer to come out. Your 55db attenuation means your line must be pretty good for the length of line you have as this figure is measured with quality and distance and i am sure a few other things that i don't know about lol. Best of luck with that and i hope those details help the rest of you guys.

Regards
Gary

[jeffbb]

Hi
quote sky have 3 target SNRM's. They are as follows: 7db, 9db and 12db.


Looking at the SNR margin it looks as after each disconnection the Target has gone up so each time the synch rate has paid the penalty .

Starting with target 7db , best it achieved ~8db synched  ~920Kbps
then noise on the line increased to a point where it lost synch

resynch with 9db target so synch  rate now 700 Kbps noise still getting worse until synch lost even with higher Target .

resynch with 12db target with ever increasing noise synch rate now 300 Kbps . Even with a target SNRM ~4 times higher the noise is still getting worse and  the noise spikes  cover about 4db that is +-2db around the mean.

 this noise source  has 2 characteristics

1  is that the general  noise over about an hour is increasing quite rapidly.

2 the noise source is very spiky   and seems to be much worse as time goes on . Normally you would expect the spikes to be smaller with the higher target SNR margin ,remembering that the actual target SNR scale is logarithmic .

There must be some very  strong spiky interference(REIN) .

Regards Jeff

[Wildy]

Hi all, me again.

New router made no difference (as expected). Called back and BTO blokey is coming out Tuesday morning. Will let you know how it goes after that. 

(Unless I've done something stupid and got charged 140 quid, I'll say nothing then  )

[sevenlayermuddle]

 

I've heard it said that jaffa cakes and tea are a good investment when BT come to call.  Some folks have even gone as far as a bacon sandwich.   

[Wildy]

Tea and biscuits should be doable, bacon sarnie reserved for if it gets fixed.

If he turns up at 8am as threatened all he's gonna get is an annoyed-looking fat man in a dressing gown.

[coolsnakeman]

lolll that doesn't sound nice to look at lol. You won't be charged for the engineer visit sky will cover the charge for you unless they decide to redirect the charge to you which they won't. BB engineers are usually free of charge. What happens is BTW will charge sky for the engineer if it turns out to be a fault in your domain and not on BTW's network and if sky feel its fair for you to be charged they will then redirect the charge to you. I work for sky BB tech support for 3 and a half years they don't redirect any of there charges they cover them all even if your router turns out to be faulty or ur filter sky still cover the charge so don't worry about it:)

Regards
Gary

[Wildy]

This may be a silly question but are there 'proper' broadband engineers or are they all just BTO guys who do whatever jobs they're given?

[waltergmw]

Hi Wildy,

My experience with many poor to horrible lines around Ewhurst is that, like any organisation, BT do have specialists and they can escalate a fault.
However there are quite a few, even some engineers that I observe as being very helpful, who are not aware of the intricacies of what can be a difficult subject.
There is also an inbuilt constrictive mechanism which I believe is designed to reduce BT's activities to the minimum.
The major hurdle with a difficult fault is to get beyond the first line and to be able to define a specific fault that BT feel they are obliged to fix.
It's much better if the fault can be classed as a telephone fault rather than a broadband one.
The worst situation is to force BT into declaring a line as a "false green" so that, without the Universal Service Obligation, BT can just leave you to rot.
Thankfully those occasions are rare and should drop even more with FTTC solutions installed.

At the first level BT Engineers sometimes seem to be strongly discouraged from attempting to investigate matters in detail. It must be very frustrating for the keen ones knowing they have to leave a fault and, unless they are lucky, will have the fault re-investigated by someone else without knowing in detail what has been attempted. The engineers do usually fill in a job sheet with details of their findings, but it depends upon their thoroughness whether this is sufficient.

That said, there must be many faults which are simple to cure and are successfully dealt with quite efficiently.

On the other hand I have had some which go on for over 6 months as they are intermittent and BT's system just can't cope with them.
In those situations it is vital to have an ISP who will go the extra mile and can take note of Routerstats and the other long-term diagnostics we have available here.
BT can log some data but, in normal circumstances, it falls far short of our capabilities here. The trick is to harness all these resources in the most efficient manner.

BT do not like publishing their network difficulties so knowing what performance is achieved locally can be a great help; as can a knowledge of the states of the lines especially aluminum ones which can be a nightmare.

Please note these are the observations of a local helper not linked in any way to BT. Perhaps some ISPs and / or anonymous BT staff might like to add their comments?

Kind regards,
Walter