connection nightmares

[caledoniang]

hi all - my 1st post, please be gentle

have been an idnet customer for a long time. always been pretty happy until I decided that I wanted adsl2+ when it was first offered, and moved from my lovely adslmax connection.

anyway, cutting a long story short the connection became not so good when I was switched and has slowly got worse. after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing I got a loan of an idnet router (to test instead of my slightly aged belkin 7633) and my connection went from the ridiculous (about 2.3 mbits - my bt profile being 2.5) to the sublime (about 10 mbits). however, because of the disconnections (apparently a lot) my connection was then throttled back to 2.5 mbits with 448 up. when i look at the stats on my newly bought netgear (hey-ho only 50 quid......) i get this:

ADSL Link     Downstream     Upstream
Connection Speed    3023 kbps    448 kbps
Line Attenuation    29.0 db    14.3 db
Noise Margin    26.3 db    24.5 db

having been around a bit with broadband I know that the noise margin is very good (as it should be at 2.3 mbits........) but the connection speed is pants. today i got an email from idnet telling me bt have capped the speed of the line to this 'cos it won't support anything faster. this is sooooo frustrating as i've gone from a solid 8 mbit down/800 k up adslmax line to a really poor, and no longer worth the money, 21cn adsl2+ line.

a couple of other things of note - there's no master socket on the bt box in the house, which indicates it's quite old as I understand it, and i've dis-connected the pin 3 ringer wire that was on the extension socket i'm using.

if anyone can do anything to help me i'd be ever so grateful as having become used to lovely speedy broadband over the years I hate being stuck at 2002 speeds.

yours in hope - cg.

[Simon]

 

I don't know a lot about this myself, but I do know a lot of people have had similar problems, and that ADSL2+ seems to be more sensitive to noise than Max was.  Umm... I hope I'm not making myself look a pillock (wouldn't be the first time), but your noise margin looks very high to me, as, ideally, it should be around the 6db - 9db mark (unless I'm getting confused with Max), so if yours is that high, it might indicate a noisy line, thus the drop in speed.

Someone better at this than me will be along soon, but in the meantime, can you run a BT Speedtest, and post the results? 

[caledoniang]

hi simon,
i would post it but I ran one less than 3 hours ago!

anyway, the speedtest result showed i had a profile of about 2.3 mbits down and 330 k up. it said my profile was 3150 kbps.

pants pants pants.

incidentally, when they turned it up it was working at 13 mbits with a noise margin of about 5. idnet tell me it disconnected too many times. but to be honest i managed to do a lot of downloading despite the fact it was apparently down so frequently.......and at about 1.3 MB/sec. thought it was sorted. apparently not.

soooooooo frustrating! CG

[Simon]

Have you tried a quiet line test?  I think it's 17070 option 2.  If you can hear noise on the line, report it to BT as a voice fault (don't mention ADSL), and see where that gets you.

As I said before, though, you may want to wait until someone more clued up than me comes along to confirm this. 

[Sebby]

Your sync is way too low for that attenuation. What is clear is that your line is suffering from noise bursts - just look at the 26.3dB noise margin, which suggests that the router sync'd at a noisy time. Re-sync now and you should sync much higher. Unfortunately, there's something causing the noise bursts and we need to get to the bottom of that, otherwise the same thing will keep happening.

ADSL2+ is much more susceptible to noise than Max was owing to the fact that is utilises double the number of frequencies. With no NTE5 master socket, it's difficult to rule out internal wiring as the culprit, even though you've removed the ring wires.

If I were you, I'd try my luck at getting an NTE5 fitted for free - tell BT you want to fit your own extensions but have the old style master socket. I know it's worked for some people in that past. Failing that, you might want to see how much BT will charge you to fit one. Only that once you've got that, you can see if you still have issued when using the test socket, which eliminates internal wiring.

I hope this helps for starters.

[Lance]

I disagree Sebby about the noise margin.

I think it is high because of the cap on the line.

I think I would get back on to support and ask about the possibility of restarting the training period or ask then to have another word with BT about reversing the DLM.

[caledoniang]

thanx guys, idnet have basically said that bt refuse to turn the speed up cos of the errors. although the errors didn't seem an issue when it was battering along at 1.3 MB/sec. i've been through the training period thing again - it seemed to be working fine then got capped back to 2.5 bleeding mbits.

i agree that the noise margin is ridiculous - idnet don't and apparently don't want to help anymore - and it's because the line's been capped at 2.5 mbits.......I think anyway. i might try phoning bt. the chance of them coming to fit a modern line box are probably somewhere between slim and vanishing.

So, it seems i'm stuck now with a crapo connection and very little hope of improving it. Regretting ever having heard of adsl2+ 

CG

[caledoniang]

replying to myself now - I did just restart the router (about 20 times/day at the mo) and the speed's still stuck at cr*p mbit/sec

CG

[Lance]

Unfortunately the beast that is BT can be very stubborn and frustrating.

It does sound as if support have done everything they can.

Maybe one last thing is to see if they can get BT to revert you back to max but rather than a profiling change you'll need the actual physical change.

[caledoniang]

have tried that too, this was my last resort

apparently, there's no way back to max from adsl2+ and the f'ing 21st century network. the irony of having had better sync from bulldog in a house with even older wiring than this one is not lost on me and i'm afraid it's looking increasingly like i might have to turn to the darkside and cable broadband. having had such a great time on idnet i'm loath to give up but it's really, really frustrating paying 35 quid a month for this.

thanx for your replies CG

[Simon]

I don't think it's because IDNet "apparently don't want to help anymore", but sometimes they just hit one of BTs brick walls, and if BT won't budge, there's little IDNet can do. 

[dujas]

I wouldn't keep resetting the router so much, BT will just see that as further evidence that your line is unstable. If what they say about the error count is true, then it appears you're unfortunate to have some noise 'polluting' the transmitted ADSL signal at a frequency that only ADSL2+ uses and not ADSL1. Options available I can think of are:

If you think internal wiring is to blame, calling BT Openreach out to fit a new NT5E master socket would cost £25.

You could have a second phone line fitted and then order an ADSL Max product on it. That would cost £125 unless there's a special offer on, or a call provider willing to waive it for a long contract.

Transfer to AAISP and take them up on their "Give us a month and we'll sort your problem line or your money back." pledge, no guarantee they'll get anything more out of BT though.

If you have VM cable available, personally I'd go for that, the customer service may be dire but the Internet connection is usually very good.

[Lance]

An alternative if available is possibly to migrate to llu, such as Be or O2. That entails a physical change at the exchange. 

[Ray]

 

[Sebby]

An alternative if available is possibly to migrate to llu, such as Be or O2. That entails a physical change at the exchange. 

That would certainly be the best option in this case.

[David]

Good luck with it and 

[Baz]

replying to myself now - I did just restart the router (about 20 times/day at the mo) and the speed's still stuck at cr*p mbit/sec

CG

Im far from been an expert but that sounds way too many times to be restarting your router, may well have the wrong effect.When did you upgrade to ADSL2+.have you gone through the training period for the line.

sorry if this is of no help to you