Internet connection woes - advice would be great

loftie

loftie

loftie

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17 Oct 2009
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Heyo all, thought I'd reach out for advice from the OCUK crowd as I'm not sure how to progress with my ISP.

We're with talktalk - yes, I know, but they've generally been fine in the many years we've had them.

We started having connection issues Thursday night, the internet will randomly disconnect.

We've had OpenReach out, they've said the cab is fine, the house is fine, but they changed the integrated filter, faceplate and cable to the router.
We've had a new router.
We've had a talk talk engineer who also said the house is fine and connection seems ok.

The issue, unless it's fixed itself since the engineer left this morning, is still on going. Now talktalks response is they need to send another openreach engineer, my reply was the house has been checked by two engineers, the cabinet by one, at what point do we assume the property isn't the issue? They replied saying it's the only option available to them.

Since I don't really know anything about networks, or networking, is there anything that could be causing the issue outside of the cabinet and house that I could fire back to them so they actually investigate something apart from our property?

For note - AFAIK we're being charged for each visit if no fault is found with it, even though they've seen the router logs and noticed that it's disconnecting a fair amount.

Thanks in advance all.
 
I had the same issue with plusnet a couple of years ago.
Same thing, random multiple disconnects, over 50 a day when really bad, this caused the DLM to kick in and reduce speeds down to try and stabilise. They even turned it off at one point but it still dropped. Over a period of 6-7 months I had 17 (yes 17!) engineers out all at varying levels of expertise / seniority
They replaced the line from pole to my home, changed the faceplate, replaced my router twice, checked my wiring multiple time, re-ran a cable inside my home, and we still had drop outs.
They even replaced the line cards at the cab and moved me to another line in the cabinet but no luck.
Turned out it was the cabling between the exchange cabinet and sub cabinet in the road,
Eventually they replaced this, but only after 2 months after identifying the problem due to issues getting planning to close the road etc, but since they replaced the cables its been fairly solid ( I say fairly as we get the odd blip, but nothing major) and we even got a speed boost from expected speed of 18-20 to a steady 40.

Just keep pushing them, make notes of every visit and escalate also note down all disconnects, times, date, durations.
They (Talk Talk) will offer you to leave your contract, but it wont solve anything if its an Openreach issue. Just get Talk Talk to escalate to Openreach.
Once its sorted present your findings and ask for recompense for the issues, don't accept any charges in the meantime either, you'll never get a refund.
Also try not to lose your temper when logging the faults, if the person on the end is unhelpful, ask to speak to a manager or hang up and call back, but be prepared to spend a bit of time getting this resolved

Good luck !
 
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sad099 said:
I had the same issue with plusnet a couple of years ago.
Same thing, random multiple disconnects, over 50 when really bad, this caused the DLM to kick in and reduce speeds down to try and stabilise. They even turned it off at one point but it still dropped. Over a period of 6-7 months I had 17 (yes 17!) engineers out all at varying levels of expertise / seniority
They replaced the line from pole to my home, changed the faceplate, replaced my router twice, checked my wiring multiple time, re-ran a cable inside my home, and we still had drop outs.
They even replaced the line cards at the cab and moved me to another line in the cabinet but no luck.
Turned out it was the cabling between the exchange cabinet and sub cabinet in the road,
Eventually they replaced this, but only after 2 months after identifying the problem due to issues getting planning to close the road etc, but since they replaced the cables its been fairly solid ( I say fairly as we get the odd blip, but nothing major) and we even got a speed boost from expected speed of 18-20 to a steady 40.

Just keep pushing them, make notes of every visit and escalate also note down all disconnects, times, date, durations.
They (Talk Talk) will offer you to leave your contract, but it wont solve anything if its an Openreach issue. Just get Talk Talk to escalate to Openreach.
Once its sorted present your findings and ask for recompense for the issues, don't accept any charges in the meantime either, you'll never get a refund.
Also try not to lose your temper when logging the faults, if the person on the end is unhelpful, ask to speak to a manager or hang up and call back, but be prepared to spend a bit of time getting this resolved

Good luck !
Click to expand...
Ouch. Yea ours was around 50Mbps, it's been down to 30Mbps with the line management which isn't great. TT won't send out anyone with accepting charges so we can't really do much, and while we are out of contract leaving isn't on the cards unfortunately as it's not my call. Currently got them waiting for permission to send out a second openreach engineer but I said I want to wait to see if it's still disconnecting, I'm hoping it's sorted itself but not holding my breath. I can hope :cry:
*Chris said:
Had anything changed prior to Thursday night? Any works going on near the house?
Click to expand...
There's a house a few doors up being redone (loft conversion) with the tarp going mental in the wind, and the telephone pole is between us. I suppose it's not impossible something went into it. Other than that there are road works around but not near me or our green cabinet on the street.
 
loftie said:
There's a house a few doors up being redone (loft conversion) with the tarp going mental in the wind, and the telephone pole is between us. I suppose it's not impossible something went into it. Other than that there are road works around but not near me or our green cabinet on the street.
Click to expand...

Worth looking into that more no? Who is your neighbour/s with? Anyone else facing problems?
When you get drop outs, can you attribute any other events that occur at the same time in the house, namely around power usage, or other appliances/things on network that might be doing something?
 
jaybee said:
Worth looking into that more no? Who is your neighbour/s with? Anyone else facing problems?
When you get drop outs, can you attribute any other events that occur at the same time in the house, namely around power usage, or other appliances/things on network that might be doing something?
Click to expand...
Neighbours are virgin, the engineer said they've not had any other outages that he knows of, but that is the talktalk engie not the openreach one. Forgot to ask the openreach engie, but we had a fairly long conversation and he didn't mention issues in the area.

As for times, it's all random. Seems to be mostly night and early morning, but has done it middle of the day too. There's no real pattern than I can make out. Originally I assumed it was them doing maintenance considering the times - we've had issues before late night/early hours when they've had maintenance scheduled that seems to affect our internet even though it's literally nowhere near us.
 
ChrisD. said:
How do you know that the issue is external to the property? What internal testing have you done?
Click to expand...
What testing could I do? Kinda clueless at this.
I tried removing the integrated filter from the master socket, tried a BNIB filter in the test port.
Integrated filter, faceplate and cable to router have all been changed by the Open Reach engineer - though that was precautionary because they saw no issues. Open Reach engineer then ran their own tests with their equipment while here. Showed the line should be getting 55Mbps while the router at the time was syncing at 44Mbps so they requested TT to supply a new router to try. But they saw no issues.
Second router has been supplied and tried.

I'm not really sure what could be affecting it internally tbh so not sure what else to try. I've not got any powerline adapters in the house, nor has the network been changed in a long time. The router is right next to the master socket and plugged directly into it - no extensions to remove etc. No noise on phone line that I can detect.

All devices lose connection - WiFi and wired. Router reconnects but it's not like it resets as I do not lose access to the router the moment the internet drops.

Connection drops are random and appear to have no pattern, there's nothing electrical that I can think of that could be causing some kind of interference.

For note - here are some of the logs I've managed to gather from the router/my chat history with TT.
Times

Replacement router (that i can see from the screenshots i took, pretty sure there were some during the night, but I'd need to reconnect the router to get the times)

30/1
4:06pm
4:04pm
4:03pm

Original router

30/1
11:15am
6:56am
2:03am
2:02am
2:01am
1:59am
1:23am
0:58am
0:56am
0:55am
0:54am
0:54am (twice)
0:52am
0:49am
0:48am

29/01
10:14am (was down for about 30 mins if i'm reading the logs right)
10:12am
9:38am

28/01
1:10pm
12:39pm

27/01
10:35pm
11:02am
4:28am
4:02am
3:57am

Logs display "VDSL connectivity is down port 1"

Yesterday was particularly bad. There were more in the evening, but I don't have the logs available to me currently.
 
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Where is the main connection cabinet for the neighbourhood? What state is it in? When I was with NTL (that dates it!) I remember a weird fault being caused by kids sitting on the cabinet and kicking the door, so eventually the door deformed and water got in and wreaked havoc.
 
Ah, I didn't really it was showing as VDSL down, if the router has been replaced then it's definitely an issue outside of your house. This is where having a competent ISP pays dividends.
 
Quartz said:
Where is the main connection cabinet for the neighbourhood? What state is it in? When I was with NTL (that dates it!) I remember a weird fault being caused by kids sitting on the cabinet and kicking the door, so eventually the door deformed and water got in and wreaked havoc.
Click to expand...
Not far, fairly sure it looked fine when we drove past it earlier. The open reach engie should have checked it though. Thankfully the school by us filters around two roads - one far to the left of us and one to the right so they go around us :D

ChrisD. said:
Ah, I didn't really it was showing as VDSL down, if the router has been replaced then it's definitely an issue outside of your house. This is where having a competent ISP pays dividends.
Click to expand...
Yea, that's the issue they want to send a 3rd engineer out as they seem to have no other options available to them according to them. So was seeing if there was something to fire back to say it might be 'this' and that's not in our house, since the house and cab are apparently fine.

No DCs tonight so far, so hopefully..... even managed to play some BL3 with friends! Will see when I wake up if it's dropped over night without increasing speed, because the DLM might also kick in.
 
Nothing you can do other than let the Openreach visits play out, you've eliminated everything that you could be responsible for by connecting the TalkTalk-supplied router into the test port of your master socket.

Ask the next person who turns up if it's worth moving you to a different port in the cabinet.

You won't be charged for a visit where no fault can be found, the charge is passed on by some ISPs but that's only meant to be situations where your equipment has been proven to be at fault, not simply because nobody could find a problem.
 
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DC'd 3 minutes after my last post :cry:
Caged said:
Nothing you can do other than let the Openreach visits play out, you've eliminated everything that you could be responsible for by connecting the TalkTalk-supplied router into the test port of your master socket.

Ask the next person who turns up if it's worth moving you to a different port in the cabinet.

You won't be charged for a visit where no fault can be found, the charge is passed on by some ISPs but that's only meant to be situations where your equipment has been proven to be at fault, not simply because nobody could find a problem.
Click to expand...
Roger, will see how it plays out, as it's vastly more stable today that it was yesterday, so I'm hoping things are improved. I'll mention the port if it progresses, cheers.
 
agw_01 said:
Set up a ThinkBroadband monitor

It'll monitor your connection, so you don't have to.

Broadband Quality Monitor | thinkbroadband

FREE Broadband Quality Monitor to keep track of latency & packet loss
www.thinkbroadband.com www.thinkbroadband.com
Click to expand...

I was coming back to this thread to say exactly the same thing. OP, you should set this up, and if you can, disconnect everything inside your house for just a day, so it's ONLY the router connected to the internet. i.e. Turn off wireless, and unplug all ethernet cables so there is nothing on your home network actually connected to the internet. Then if you see drop outs after a few hours, you know it literally is nothing on your network causing it at least. Then it only leaves the router itself, master socket and associated wiring back to the cabinet.
 
That is an interesting suggestion, so will have a read. Not sure if I have a static IP however, but I believe my router supports some dynamic dns services.

Considering it'll mean kicking people off the network for a bit, i might try to tailor it to night time since
A) that's when most of the issues seem to occur
B) everyone is asleep
C) I can turn off the wired pc and no-one will care

Cheers for that!

Edit: I've set it up, set the router to respond to pings, but the graph remains blank unfortunately
 
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Are you due for full fibre anytime soon? I expect Openreach will just want to kick the can down the road due to aging FTTC infrastructure. The point above about asking to put you on another pair is a good one but I'd expect a competent OR engineer to have tried this already.
 
ChrisD. said:
Are you due for full fibre anytime soon? I expect Openreach will just want to kick the can down the road due to aging FTTC infrastructure. The point above about asking to put you on another pair is a good one but I'd expect a competent OR engineer to have tried this already.
Click to expand...
I did ask the OR engineer this, and their response was that the Barnet/Enfield (my area) infrastructure is particularly old so it's going to take a while, coupled with the fact that the Fibre team has, apparently, been filled by all the people the copper team wanted to get rid of, I'm not sure it's due soon. That said, AFAIK it's has it not got to happen in the next 2 years due to them changing the telephone systems?

By another pair where you referring to Cageds mentioning switching to another port and typo'd? Or is another pair referring to something else?

TIA

loftie said:
That is an interesting suggestion, so will have a read. Not sure if I have a static IP however, but I believe my router supports some dynamic dns services.

Considering it'll mean kicking people off the network for a bit, i might try to tailor it to night time since
A) that's when most of the issues seem to occur
B) everyone is asleep
C) I can turn off the wired pc and no-one will care

Cheers for that!

Edit: I've set it up, set the router to respond to pings, but the graph remains blank unfortunately
Click to expand...
Ooo it's started working

Link to graph, for science!

 
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loftie said:
I did ask the OR engineer this, and their response was that the Barnet/Enfield (my area) infrastructure is particularly old so it's going to take a while, coupled with the fact that the Fibre team has, apparently, been filled by all the people the copper team wanted to get rid of, I'm not sure it's due soon. That said, AFAIK it's has it not got to happen in the next 2 years due to them changing the telephone systems?

By another pair where you referring to Cageds mentioning switching to another port and typo'd? Or is another pair referring to something else?
Click to expand...
Have you checked for alt-nets? Some may buy you out of your contract, I think VM do this also.

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bidb.uk bidb.uk

You can ask OR to try another port in the cab if there's capacity, they can also use a different pair on the copper from the cabinet to your house. As said, a competent engineer may have already tried this.
 
They are actually out of contract AFAIK, but it's not my choice as to whether they move. Unfortunately the original TT email was heavily used, so it'd be a rather big push for me to convince them to get off it. Though in doing so they could lose the massive amount of spam they get which would be fantastic. I have been semi succesful in getting them to use GMail.

I have suggested Virgin, specifically because there's an O2 contract tied to the property and because it'd be removing anything OR from the equation. That said, the installation of a new line would be not be received well. Also the ball ache of having to phone them at the end of the contract each time to stop the amount doubling isn't something they want - in this regard TT has been really good TBH.

But swings and roundabouts at the end of the day.
 
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