I have a possible REIN fault

Huw · 10 Sep 2011 at 16:37

This one's new to me.

The good news: My provider is Zen, and they're fantastic, easily the best ISP I've ever been with. They're plainly doing everything they can to get this fixed.

The bad news: After weeks of terrible (and completely unpredictable) intermittency on my ADSL service and a BT engineer visit that found nothing, Zen informed me that we're probably looking at a REIN fault that could take months to fix!

MONTHS! My connection can't be relied on for hardly anything at the moment. Just two days ago it took me three attempts to download a few updates to my Arch Linux system. Last night the connection was down so often I gave up using the PC altogether.

If this goes on for months I'm going to go insane. I used to get 16-17 Mbit/s downstream with a rock-solid connection and now I'm lucky to get a connection at all and when I do, it's usually no more than half that speed. This sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before!

So, anyone with experience of REIN faults here? What can I expect - will it really take months to fix? And what's this I'm reading elsewhere on the internet - sometimes it's beyond BT's remit to fix it? How can it be beyond their remit?!

Azuse05 · 10 Sep 2011 at 17:11

Problem with them, if you do have one, is finding the source for a variety of reasons. See here:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/rein.htm

Tealc · 10 Sep 2011 at 17:13

It's beyond BT's remit because the object/s causing the interference are outside of BT's control. Bit of a joke really. Do they still cling to their 'We only have to provide you with a working voice line'?

This page might be helpful..

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/rein.htm

Are there any trends to the outtages? I tracked a fault on my line for months and saw it fail mostly around 10-11.30 in the mornings and when it was wet. BT came out and said there was nothing wrong with the line but changed two things (one on the cable as it left the property to go over to the pole and the other on the pole itself) and it fixed the line. I'm guessing there must have been some crosstalk on the pole.

Rroff · 10 Sep 2011 at 17:27

BT are a joke. If your not using one already try and get your hands on a Netgear DG834G or GT flashed to the DG Team firmware then atleast you can tweak things a bit to try and make up for the line conditions and these routers tend to cling onto the line like a limpit. I had a REIN type fault a few months back, went on for weeks with no interest from BT - pretty sure it was damp getting into a junction box as it cleared up on drier days, only cleared up when BT had to redo some of the cables/cabinet after an accident.

Tuesday this week BT managed to accidentally cancel our entire phone and internet accounts instead of another customer... do you think they had any interest in expediting reconnection or acknowledge the inconvenience this caused? nope they'd rather blow us off and lie to us... I'm having to use my phone as a modem atm at a pitifully slow 40kbit/s so I feel your pain.

Azuse05 · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:04

BT and RIEN faults aren't a joke tbh, they will send and engineer if pestered enough but the simple truth is most of the time it's something they really can't fix i.e. external problem.

The best I've seen was some poor bloke who traced a rein fault to an incorrectly wired dish pointed at his house across the street

Not much bt could do really.

Huw · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:06

Well this is all very depressing. I'm hoping that the second engineer coming early next week will find some fault he can fix. If it turns out to be a REIN issue that can't be fixed I will have no choice but to move to cable, i.e. Virgin, after vowing never to give them any more of my business.

Rroff · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:28

Azuse05 said:
BT and RIEN faults aren't a joke tbh, they will send and engineer if pestered enough but the simple truth is most of the time it's something they really can't fix i.e. external problem.

The best I've seen was some poor bloke who traced a rein fault to an incorrectly wired dish pointed at his house across the street Not much bt could do really.

Granted if its environmental interference theres not much BT can do - my neighbour used to do a lot of ham radio stuff and that would be play havok with it but fortunatly hes packed that in. But even getting BT to investigate it and see if it is anything their end is an exercise in futility its like you'd asked them to cut off their arm. I've more than once had to resort to contacting Ian Livingstone directly to get issues dealt with.

Scougar · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:43

GoogalyMoogaly has been having a terrible intermittent fault for months now, and had multiple visits from BTvia his third party ISP. Everything internal has been replaced, and new copper lines switched to, his exchange hardware 'lifted and shifted', but still the fault remains (I think he said the SNR just bottoms out randomly). They have put it down to 'REIN', but what that really means is they don't really have a damn clue.

Your issue sounds MUCH worse than his.. so I really feel for you, as I know it's been many months of visit's and pestering just to get as far as he has. Just keep on talking to your ISP to try and get it resolved, in the end it could turn out to be something simple. I think it's just unfortunate that consumer lines don't tend to generate that much revenue, so spending a long time doing a thorough investigation initially is seen as too much money (Which unfortunately makes BT look very bad).

From the other side.... think how hard it is to trace and intermittant fault in a cable/system. It's a shame they can't plug in a simple circuit to detect issue's at the clients end and monitor it themselves for a while, so they can determine where the issue is occuring.

EDIT: Are you able to describe the EXACT symptoms? I.e. can you log anthing to see what's going on with your SNR etc?

wonko · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:46

Have you looked at running RouterStats or similar to see if you can correlate noise margin / sync speed with anything? E.g. wet weather, devices being switched on? ISTR the kitz site suggests using an am radio to try to find sources.

If you're lucky the source of the noise is within your house and can be tracked down. I had a weird one a while ago which had all the symptoms of RIEN - the ADSL dropped out coincident with F1 quali/races. It turned out to be a faulty SMPS for an occasionally used monitor which 10+ minutes or so after switching on (to watch the F1) the power supply started to kickout so much mains-borne noise that it started to interfere with the router. A real 'doh!' moment when I put two and two together.

Huw · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:50

Scougar said:
EDIT: Are you able to describe the EXACT symptoms? I.e. can you log anthing to see what's going on with your SNR etc?

I'll look into this RouterStats program that Wonky mentioned. Anything I can do to help with this, I'm willing to do! Fortunately Zen are very good at keeping up the pressure on BT so at least I have that in my favour.

Scougar · 10 Sep 2011 at 22:51

BTW... sorry if this is gonna be 'too long' but if you are having issues still by the end of the month, I will send you my DG834G V4 that has the DGTeam firmware on it, so you can get some decent logging on the go. Obviously I'd expect you to do some basic checking first like plugging into your test socket to elimate your internal wiring, and possibly using a different modem and network cables to hook up to the PC.

But definately logging on your modem is gonna help understand the issue properly :-)

EDIT: as wonko said, it can be power units in your appliciances that cause the issue as well! (even on new ones, like fridges/freezes/tv's, laptops power bricks, anything!). Also.. if you neighbour has recently got sky, the boxes of your neighbours can cause havoc on occasion (maybe sky have fixed this now).

Huw · 10 Sep 2011 at 23:14

Scougar said:
BTW... sorry if this is gonna be 'too long' but if you are having issues still by the end of the month, I will send you my DG834G V4 that has the DGTeam firmware on it, so you can get some decent logging on the go.

Wow, that's really kind of you, thanks! To begin with I'll wait and see what the second engineer says, and then what Zen say afterward. Also, it looks like that RouterStats program will work with my router so I'll give that a go first too.

Incidentally, can't my ISP monitor all of this from their end?

Obviously I'd expect you to do some basic checking first like plugging into your test socket to elimate your internal wiring, and possibly using a different modem and network cables to hook up to the PC.

Zen have already had me do all sorts of stuff. I've tried an alternative router, unplugged the landline, used the test socket, alternative filter (which has since been replaced by something I think is called an RF3 filter). It's definitely not my equipment!

Scougar · 11 Sep 2011 at 00:11

Hoping you get it solved asap obviously.. but if you don't just give me a prod about the netgear modem/router (as I will probably forget about this thread as I'm moving house at the end of the month).

Tealc · 11 Sep 2011 at 08:27

This is the sort of stuff I recorded with Routerstats. I've no idea what sort of fault this was but it was on and off with me for months. Connection would be steady for hours and then all of a sudden go to the dogs for an hour or so, before going back to normal.

And when I finally contacted BT directly. My ISP is Sky but line is BT. I knew it was nothing to do with Sky as I had the noise on the line. BT of course blamed Sky's equipment.

I've seen a lot worse than this on here too.

wonko · 11 Sep 2011 at 08:54

This might be stating the obvious, but it's worth logging both noise margin and sync speed and putting them on the same plot if you can (I think I managed it in RouterStats). In my case when the interference started it was enough for the noise margin to take a nose dive, and the router lost sync, but then resynced at a much lower speed with the noise margin back at it's target figure.

Hope you get it sorted Huw - I know how annoying it is. Another couple of thoughts:
- have you asked your neighbours if they are having problems and what sort of sync speed/stability they have? If it's something generating interference along the cable route from the exchange then it would be strange if only one ADSL connection was affected.
- when you tried a different router, did this include the power supply?

Huw · 11 Sep 2011 at 09:13

Thanks again for the advice chaps. Wonko, I could ask my neighbours I suppose but I don't think they even know what an internet is! If they were having any kind of problem at all they'd have been to see me by now, no doubt (you know how it goes - I made the mistake of mentioning I know about computers so now I'm tech support for life). But it's worth asking I guess.

Yeah when I switched routers I used a separate power supply. About the only thing I haven't changed is the network cable, but the BT engineer said during his investigation that what we're seeing has nothing to do with the cable.

I did manage to get that RouterStats thing working with a bit of tweaking so I'll set up the graphs as you suggest Wonko. I've also emailed Zen to ask whether it would be any help to them. My aim with this is to try and pin down some sort of pattern which may provide clues.

starfighter · 11 Sep 2011 at 10:18

Is there any kind of pattern, that usually indicates it is REIN. Best to work out what it could be yourself if possible.

You will get an E side, D side cable swap, the drop cable checked and the port tested, possibly a lift and shift or a port test ateast before they send outt he REIN engineers to track it down then BT will ask them nicely to stop but it might not be preventable and legally they are allowed to do it.

Deffo sure it isn't anything in your house?

Maybe it is a good time to get Fibre incase the REIN is prior to the Cab, that should fix it.

Huw · 11 Sep 2011 at 10:43

starfighter said:
Is there any kind of pattern, that usually indicates it is REIN. Best to work out what it could be yourself if possible.

That's precisely why I've started using RouterStats. I can't discern any kind of pattern myself, so running RouterStats constantly will hopefully narrow it down.

Deffo sure it isn't anything in your house?

Well it isn't any of my equipment, and nothing else has changed in the house since it all began. No new electrical equipment, nothing faulty, etc. I've racked my brain over this one!

Maybe it is a good time to get Fibre incase the REIN is prior to the Cab, that should fix it.

If I could get FTTC I would, but it isn't available here yet. And going cable, which obviously means Virgin Media, is an absolute last resort because I hate them!

Huw · 14 Sep 2011 at 06:38

Well this is all bloody typical. Last Friday the connection had been relatively stable so Zen said they'd monitor it over the weekend and get an engineer out if necessary. Friday night it was abysmal and not much better Saturday morning, so I phoned Zen and asked them to expedite the engineer visit. They agreed, and scheduled one for yesterday afternoon.

Of course, ever since I called Zen on Saturday the line became much more stable. I started logging with RouterStats Sunday lunchtime. From then until the engineer arriving yesterday at just after 13:00, the line had been perfectly stable (as far as I could see anyway). So obviously there was nothing for the engineer to find. He said that if it had played up while he was here he would've been able to narrow it down a lot, but since it didn't, it was basically a waste of time. I mentioned a lift-and-shift but he said they only did that for completely non-functioning lines.

It still seems fine to me, although it's a few Mbps slower downstream than it was, but I put that down to the line needing to re-sync at the higher rate which will come with time.

I called Zen after the engineer left and brought them up to speed. They agreed that the line seems much more stable but said they're still seeing one or two drops a day which, given my distance from the exchange (about 950 metres as the crow flies) I shouldn't be getting any drops at all, and that if a third or even tenth engineer visit was necessary, that's what they'd do! Zen rule.

So here I am. Looking through RouterStats it seems the line was just fine again all last night, although still syncing at a slower speed than I used to get. I guess all I can do is wait until it gets much worse or miraculously clears up completely.

Tealc · 14 Sep 2011 at 09:33

That happened to me when I reported my fault to BT. Was the worst it had been and was crackling so bad I couldn't hear BT tell me that my call was important to them. By the time I got connected to India, or wherever they have their call centres these days the noise had totally gone and remained gone for 4 days while the Engineer visit wasd planned.

So Routerstats is showing a constant SNR value now? Mine only fluctuates by 0.1-0.2 dB now all day. By how much has the sync speed dropped? Has the SNR risen since before the sync speed drop?

Maybe one day you'll get lucky and the line will go bad when the Engineer is actually there.

Have BT done anything besides check for a fault? My calling Engineer was most helpful and even though he couldn't find a fault he still replaced two things on the line, and fitted a new faceplate.