Gfast constant drops

TheGamingGeneral · 24 May 2020 at 15:08

Hello, I had G fast (Fibre Max 2 Broadband from EE) installed approx. 8 weeks ago. From day 1 it has been a problem, I am constantly getting drops in connection, the router gives an error of:

WAN connection WAN1_INTERNET_ETH disconnected.[ERROR_NO_CARRIER]

There isn’t any real rhyme nor reason to it, I haven’t noticed any trends other than when I am gaming online I will experience a bout of packet loss for up to 10 mins before the connection drops completely. It will cut off repeatedly over the course of up to an hour or so then go back to normal. I’ve had as many as 50 disconnects in 24 hours and had a few days of none at all, I’ve averaged 10 disconnects a day for the last week.

I have disconnected every wifi device, as well as turning the wifi off at the router for fear of interference, didn’t help at all. It will disconnect just as easily at 3am as it will peak times in the evening.

4 engineer visits since, they have been in the house, in the loft, disconnected and inspected the line coming into the house all the way to the cabinet. They did find faults at the cabinet but according to open reach there is no longer any issues. I am not sure where to go from here, I have looked online for similar issues and found some discussion on BT’s site but no one ever seems to follow up with what the resolution was. Has anyone had any experience of this? EEs quality assurance team tell me Gfast is a nightmare so I suspect I will have to pack it in and go back to 80/20 but of course don’t want to give up 300/50 if I don’t have too, they are sending me a new router (engineer gave me a new open reach modem on Friday) but other than that everyone seems at a loss.......

Any suggestions of what I can ask EE to do other than drop my speed?

Thanks

Caged · 24 May 2020 at 21:40

They will eventually get bored of sending people out and let you out of the contract. Gfast seems to be one of those products that works in a test environment but just cannot perform in real life, we've had the majority of the 20-30 Gfast connections we ordered show issues before we just stopped ordering it and pretended it didn't exist.

the-evaluator · 25 May 2020 at 10:56

Caged said:
Gfast seems to be one of those products that works in a test environment but just cannot perform in real life

Yep, agreed. GFast has been a bit of a disaster. I know two people that had it and they've both been let out of their contracts early because it was so unreliable.

Mikey · 27 May 2020 at 10:00

the-evaluator said:
Yep, agreed. GFast has been a bit of a disaster. I know two people that had it and they've both been let out of their contracts early because it was so unreliable.

Explains why it wall went quiet from Vodafone then etc.

Ayahuasca · 27 May 2020 at 10:36

My G.fast connection has been fine but it's expensive for what it is, I'm getting the speed they told me I would and it's a noticeable uplift on my previous standard FTTC connection, it's also dropped my pings slightly.

That being said, £40 a month is a bit of a joke in comparison to Virgin's 350mb internet only service and BT's FTTP packages.

On Holiday · 27 May 2020 at 10:49

Ayahuasca · 27 May 2020 at 10:54

^ yeah I was really pleased when they started laying the cable in my area a couple of months back. Still can't order with them yet but I'm hesitant to do so with all the reports you hear, particularly with gaming.

Avalon · 27 May 2020 at 18:36

While my g.fast initially was a ball ache, as BT hadn’t a clue what they were doing, the g.fast team were may as well have consisted of cats chasing each other round a small cupboard and neither OR or BT could talk to each other even if they were willing to. I was the first in the area to be installed which didn’t help on the OR side, but it’s been pretty much rock solid since the last install/tech visit. It did take at least 5 visits, two deadlock letters (someone in the CEO complaints team got disciplined for malicious use of the deadlock process) and nudging from the press office repeatedly via a third party who took an interest before things got to that stage. Would I prefer FTTP? Of course, symmetrical FTTP is the dream, but I am happy that what I have works as described. Just don’t expect the path to stability to be simple - it wasn’t when BT rolled out ADSL or FTTC, or when Blueyonder rolled out HSI (random fact: Broadband was the only service launch in the history of the company that didn’t die on day one, it lasted till day two before going belly up nationally).

Allnamestaken · 28 May 2020 at 13:57

I've had G.Fast for a day so far without issues but lets see....

TheGamingGeneral · 29 May 2020 at 19:45

Avalon said:
While my g.fast initially was a ball ache, as BT hadn’t a clue what they were doing, the g.fast team were may as well have consisted of cats chasing each other round a small cupboard and neither OR or BT could talk to each other even if they were willing to. I was the first in the area to be installed which didn’t help on the OR side, but it’s been pretty much rock solid since the last install/tech visit. It did take at least 5 visits, two deadlock letters (someone in the CEO complaints team got disciplined for malicious use of the deadlock process) and nudging from the press office repeatedly via a third party who took an interest before things got to that stage. Would I prefer FTTP? Of course, symmetrical FTTP is the dream, but I am happy that what I have works as described. Just don’t expect the path to stability to be simple - it wasn’t when BT rolled out ADSL or FTTC, or when Blueyonder rolled out HSI (random fact: Broadband was the only service launch in the history of the company that didn’t die on day one, it lasted till day two before going belly up nationally).

Did they ever tell you what the problem was? Could suggest it to them. The new router EE sent me didnt help, I managed to talk my work into a new router as I am working from home (Netgear R500 gaming

) and that didnt help either

.

Avalon · 30 May 2020 at 03:49

The story is a very long and boring one, the shortened version is I was the first install in an SOGEA trial area and BT sent me VoIP hardware to be part of that trial, but OR didn’t understand that (tech did his online g.fast certification a day before he turned up - explained the two previous no shows), the g.fast team refused to speak to him when they got on the right page, BT then screwed me by refusing to provision my number port. After that they decided the VoIP hub they had specifically sent me and the VoIP faceplate OR installed and the fact they had removed power from the line as per the SOGEA process (at the time) was all irrelevant as VoIP is only for business and therefore refused to do anything. When I raised it with HLC/CEO complaints they closed my complaint via deadlock on the grounds that they didn’t offer VoIP and I should speak to business (still ignoring the NDT/number fault) despite providing photographic evidence to the contrary and links to the OR press release on the subject. Eventually I pulled in some help from someone with BT/OR press office connections and suddenly I could have my own personal out of area tech who knew what he was doing for as long as I needed on a Sunday and he was authorised to literally do whatever it took (to fix the line). Total process ran almost 5 months from order, all said and done I pocketed over four figures, I would have happily foregone all of that if they had just done what they said they would do on day one. I’ll be due to renegotiate with them shortly, obviously looking forward to that

I think EE adopted the voluntary compensation scheme, so log faults, chase them periodically and if they don’t deliver what is required, push them to compensate accordingly, it soon adds up.

Harnser · 1 Jun 2020 at 21:30

WoodyUK said:
It's ridiculous considering Virginmedia have so many (compared to the other large ISPs) latency or packet loss issues to various networks because of contention but as long as their speedtests look pretty then it gets brushed under the carpet. 0/10 would not recommend VM again

I had Virgin Media for the past 3 years and agree 100% with @WoodyUK. I moved, now have 45Mbps FTTC w AAISP and the extra 'snappiness' was noticeable from day 1. And the uplink, which is what I really care about, is the same speed, and handling voice and video calls better than the Virgin network ever did.

I heard that Virgin Media business broadband is better quality, but doubt it as the problems seem network level.

balanceballs · 1 Jun 2020 at 23:47

I'm getting g.Fast in a couple of weeks. Any tips to make it go smoothly? My connection has been rock solid for a number of years now and I can't deal with dropouts/disconnections, especially now i'm WFH full time.

WJA96 · 2 Jun 2020 at 06:01

balanceballs said:
I'm getting g.Fast in a couple of weeks. Any tips to make it go smoothly? My connection has been rock solid for a number of years now and I can't deal with dropouts/disconnections, especially now i'm WFH full time.

Ask the Openreach engineer for a modem if they don't give you one and use your own router. Despite what's been posted in this thread, G.fast is a current product that Openreach will continue to install and maintain for quite a while yet and it's a way of squeezing anything up to 300Mbps down a normal copper phone line. Which is quite impressive. And the relatively high cost charged to end-users means you tend to get the speeds they advertise, unlike FTTP or Virgin in my experience.

Ayahuasca · 2 Jun 2020 at 09:16

balanceballs said:
I'm getting g.Fast in a couple of weeks. Any tips to make it go smoothly? My connection has been rock solid for a number of years now and I can't deal with dropouts/disconnections, especially now i'm WFH full time.

My EE connection has been fine with the Openreach modem they provide and the EE smart hub which I believe is just a rebranded BT hub. It's resynced a couple of times since September but always overnight in the early hours.

TheGamingGeneral · 2 Jun 2020 at 18:01

update*

So we have admitted defeat, they cannot work out what the problem is so I am being reverted back to 80/20 FTTC. Although they can't do that right now as there is congestion on the cabinet (possibly linked to the Gfast issue?). I've only had the one disconnect in the last 24 hours and the speed is dropping, appears as it drops connection becomes more stable, they don't think using the slower Gfast (150/30 I think) will help. Disappointing as my 4G coverage here is faster than 80!

TheGamingGeneral · 2 Jun 2020 at 18:24

balanceballs said:
I'm getting g.Fast in a couple of weeks. Any tips to make it go smoothly? My connection has been rock solid for a number of years now and I can't deal with dropouts/disconnections, especially now i'm WFH full time.

I had BT before 80/20 rock solid, never a drop and used to get pretty close to those speeds on the desktop, it wasn't until I went to Gfast I got issues. I am going to ask them again to try the 150 package as, so far as I can tell in my area at least EE are the only ones offering the 330, BT/sky etc only offer the 150 so perhaps they know something EE don't.

the-evaluator · 3 Jun 2020 at 06:24

WJA96 said:
Despite what's been posted in this thread, G.fast is a current product that Openreach will continue to install and maintain for quite a while yet

But it's only being installed in areas that it is currently available, the footprint won't be expanded so it won't show up in new areas. It's a a strange positiong of being current, and dead at the same time.

Caged · 3 Jun 2020 at 10:52

Like ADSL then? That's not being deployed anywhere but it's still a product that exits and is available and fully supported. FTTC could almost fall into the same category as well now that the publicly funded rollouts are shifting to FTTP as they get more rural.

If I could get G.fast at over 300Mbps now then I'd go for it, the only situation where I'd probably be unhappy with it being available is when you're on the edge of coverage, so you get 100Mbps down and under 20Mbps up, because you've gained almost nothing over your FTTC sync and certainly had your FTTP wait extended.

WJA96 · 3 Jun 2020 at 11:43

We had a flurry of 150/30 G.fast installs about 18-24 months ago when fttp wasn't an option and you were getting almost double the download speed and about one and half times the upload speed. For effectively the same money as top-end VDSL. We use Zen and Daisy and we've had solid performance from the people who put G.fast in at home but it's really hard to ignore 910/110 fttp for £60/month from BT. For some reason Zen are capped at 330/50 on fttp so I've got people wanting to go give up their fixed IP addresses for faster access to Disney+.