Help with ADSL line, stats inside

Duke · 8 Oct 2011 at 11:15

Hi all,

Got a bit of a weird one here. This line has been poor for a long time and am trying to help get it sorted. I've tried the usual, different routers, cables, filters, into master socket etc but it hasn't made any difference. The best downstream I've seen it is about 500-600k ish but I think there is water getting into the line as it drops down and disconnects completely after bad weather. I had another look a couple of weeks ago during good weather and it wouldn't sync again after rebooting the modem and the line was clear on a phone, so a bit strange?

The distance is exactly 3 miles to the exchange by road, which is quite long but thought even 1-2 mbit would be possible with this?

As you can imagine it is unusual at the moment. The upstream is quite reasonable which I have a feeling means the downstream is being capped / fixed due to line issues?

They are not on LLU, there is one LLU provider at the exchange - Talktalk. Worth going down that route?

Any insight would be grateful before they ditch and go for satellite.

TFC · 8 Oct 2011 at 12:06

I think you have spotted the problem, water getting in somewhere has degraded the phsyical connection and the result is a poor line attenuation.
The SNR is good as BT look for a minimum of 6, so you have good overhead.
The Attenuation is an indication of your lines length and is all to do with quality of the signal passing through the line.
It looks as if the poor attenuation and disconnects have caused the BRAS profile to drop in an attempt to stabilise the connection.

At my previous house I had a similar line length to you but attenuation was about 40, that combined with an SNR of 7 gave me a 4mbit connection.

You need to find the water ingress, sort that and I think you will be fine for a 2+ connection.

As for Talk Talk.... that will solve nothing as the physical line will not alter and they are a nightmare.

HTH

Duke · 8 Oct 2011 at 13:29

Thanks for the input. I've asked them (small charity) to speak to BT about it and I think some work was done in the past to try and fix it (a few years ago), so guess we'll have to go that route again. Just wanted to check the stats and things really.

Tealc · 8 Oct 2011 at 15:20

Water on the line would normally cause problems when the phone rings too and may give an audible noise when doing a quiet line test.

Had some issue with my line which may have been water ingress on the pole next to my house. It cracked and popped occasionally, which usually followed with a total drop of connection from SNR 7-9dB to 0dB. I'm sure once I saw it having a negative value SNR.

They were able to fix it quite easily, although the engineer did maintain there was no fault they replaced an item on the pole 'just in case' and that seemed to fix it.