Do micro filters deteriorate over time?

slipd

slipd

slipd

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2004
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Location
Hampshire, England.
Hi guys,

As above, I've had a adsl nation XTE-2005 filtered faceplate on my master socket for around 18 months and its made things fairly stable on my flaky line. Combined with my billion 7800n router I've had a generally 'usable' internet connection :)

However, things have taken a bit of a turn for the worse over the last month or so... I'm currently on a 1408kbps profile. I'm used to getting at LEAST 2mb and sometimes even 2.5mb if I'm really lucky? But of late its got silly; I'm re-syncing about 4/5 times a day! Before I buy another faceplate (if its needed? Are the adsl one's still the best?) I'm going to try another bit of kit but I'm fairly certain its my plate/line.

Any thought?
 
They do fail and it's one of the standard things to try when you're trying to fix your sort of problem.

Didn't the router come with some normal filters you could test with?
 
i wouldnt expect it to be dead after that short time :confused:
i would try reseating the wires to the faceplate and maybe listen for line noise. if your router will work with routerstats you can monitor the line stats & snr.

@breman those router supplied dongle filters are terrible even on a good line. the cheapie plug in ones are surprisingly nearly as good as the adslnation ones
 
zipp0r said:
@breman those router supplied dongle filters are terrible even on a good line. the cheapie plug in ones are surprisingly nearly as good as the adslnation ones
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That's a rather sweeping and inaccurate generalisation.

For a start the quality of the supplied filters depends on what the manufacture decides to supply. Some are cheap and nasty, but some perform just as well as the best of them.
 
Could be a number of issues - christmas lights are a commonly blamed one for extra line noise at this time of year and could also be sure to more people using ADSL, etc. than ever before.

Filters do go bad tho - we had the original ADSL 1.0 engineer installed filtered faceplate from ~2001 and almost 10 years later and with an upgrade to ADSL2+ it was no longer working well enough.
 
I've seen some last years and years, others lasted a week! They tend to 'half work' when broken, which is a pain to diagnose.

Try removing all the phones / sky boxes etc, so you just have one connected to the router. Test them one at a time for a few mins/hours/days until you find the culprit
 
They only filter the voice side of the line from you to the exchange, so if you aren't really using your landline then it would be strange to see connectivity issues caused by the microfilter. If you don't use your landline I'd just remove the filter.
 
I monitored my routers stats for nearly 48 hours and although I never re-sync'd (which is unusual!) my snr did drop significantly at certain times of the day - in particular when the phone was in use, although not exclusively when the phone was being used?

I can't not have the land line in use so do you think a replacement faceplate is a worthwhile gamble from what I've described?
 
sam.wheale said:
in particular when the phone was in use, although not exclusively when the phone was being used?

I can't not have the land line in use so do you think a replacement faceplate is a worthwhile gamble from what I've described?
Click to expand...

That _could_ be indicating a bigger fault than just a problem with microfilters. Possibly damp has got into the line somewhere or a connection has become corroded/current leakage.
 
Rroff said:
That _could_ be indicating a bigger fault than just a problem with microfilters. Possibly damp has got into the line somewhere or a connection has become corroded/current leakage.
Click to expand...
But that would be a problem beyond my control wouldn't it? I.e my line provider responsibility. I think I'm with sky now for my phone line, I know I'm not with bt - they were next to useless when I've had trouble in the past...

Its funny you should say about the line being corroded; from me to the exchange there is a mixture on underground/overground lines. The line from my house goes under the drive and we have had A LOT of rain lately, maybe its started to seep through :p
 
It'll be BT Openreach's responsibility to fix the fault if it is on the network side of the NTE once Sky have requested them to send an engineer out.
 
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