My DSL connection gets even worse..

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,229
Hi guys,

I posted some time ago about problems with my DSL connection. I'll quickly recap.

I've always had trouble getting a decent connection speed, usually 1500kbps was about my maximum. I'd learnt to live with it. In January, my connection speed increased to 2200kbps which was absolutely brilliant. No idea why, it just did. Unfortunately 2-3 weeks after it did this, I experienced a period of instability and since then, I have never again seen speeds anywhere near this.

My line would only connect at 1100-1300kbps. It was, however, very stable. I am unable to stream things from youtube very well, and watching BBC Iplayer etc is something that its rarely worth bothering with.

Today, I have noticed that I am now connected at just 704kbps. I've rebooted the router 4 times now and each time it syncs at a speed of about 704kbps. This is now ridiculously slow, slower than I've had for as long as I can remember.

I really don't know what to do about it, really. I have a very long line despite living only 5 miles from the centre of a city with a population of 270,000 so it's not as if I'm sat in a rural farmhouse miles from anywhere wondering why my internet sucks. My line is long because BT routed it to an exchange that is, quite literally, on the other side of the city.

Anyway, line stats at the moment..

DSL Flavour = ADSL over POTS
Reserved Bandwidth (kbit/s) up/down = 448 / 704

Properties
Output Power (dBm) up/down = 12.5 / 14.0
Attenuation (dB) up/down = 31.5 / 63.0
Noise Margin (dB) up/down = 11.0 / 15.5

I've tried new equipment - a DG834G V4 with the DGTeam firmware - to no avail.

Any ideas? :(

I already have all the extension wiring in the house disconnected, the master faceplate removed, and the router plugged directly into the socket and have had for years.

I'm with Plusnet, who probably couldn't care less so I doubt they'll help me.
 
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It just seems odd it's steadily getting worse. If it continues to degrade at the current rate, by Christmas I won't have an internet connection at all.
 
jimbobaggies said:
You are in between the devil and the deep blue sea here. Should you choose to report a fault, and end up with a BT engineer turning up, unless he finds and fixes said fault, you would be liable for ~£120 charge.
Click to expand...

This concerns me.

Do you have lots of re-syncs?
Click to expand...

Not often, no. Had a few this evening which reminded me my internet sucked and prompted this post. Prior to that the uptime on the line was circa 3 weeks.

Do you have noise on the line? Try the quiet line test.
Click to expand...

How do I do this?

Is your line overhead, or underground? Have you noticed BT in the area working, or any utility companies working in the area since your problem started to appear?
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It's an underground line to a property built in the mid 90's. I doubt a BT van has been in this area for some time, and I can only dream of the day when somebody like Virgin decides to cable the area I live instead of focusing all efforts on the inner city areas where nobody has a job anyway.. :p
 
tolien said:
Getting back to the actual topic, you could ask Plusnet to ask Wholesale to reset your SNR margin back to the default 6dB. You'd probably find it was less stable (it's almost certainly been increased as a product of past instability) but it would be faster. The fun will be finding anyone with a clue.
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I tried this a number of months ago on the advice of you guys. At first they point blank refused, they eventually gave in and claimed they'd requested it. I've no idea whether they did or not - certainly I noticed no change on my line.
 
tolien said:
It should still have been fairly obvious - unless it was extremely unstable you'd see a speed increase and if you're trying to deal with a fault you're probably watching the modem's stats too...
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In which case they simply never bothered. I'd expect nothing less from them :(
 
Right, I've set the D834GT back up (I had gone back to my Speedtouch ages ago incase it was the new router that caused the problem and never swapped back once it was apparent it wasnt).

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 896 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 63.5 db 31.5 db
Noise Margin 17.3 db 9.0 db

Thats a HUGE noise margin, right?
 
Well, that was a disaster. Immediatly after I had posted that I set the noise margin to 50%. It reconnected and synced at 1400ish with a noise margin of 13.2db.

But I had NO connectivity. Nothing. Couldnt ping anything, couldnt use the net, nothing at all, on any machine on the network. So I set it back to 100%, it synced again at 900ish but still nothing, no connectivity. Rebooted it, still nothing. Powered down and back up, still nothing.

In the interests of experimentation though I did try setting the noise margin to 1% just to see what happened (And hey, it was broken anyway, couldnt get any worse?)

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 1536 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 63.5 db 31.5 db
Noise Margin 9.6 db 9.0 db
Click to expand...

But that was that - nothing. No internet connection any more irrespective of settings.

So I've plugged the Speedtouch 580i back in and the internet now works perfectly again :confused:

It's now connected at 1120kbps with a downstream noise margin of 15db.
 
You missed the point.. I had no internet connection at all. Nothing. I can't sit with no internet for 5 days incase maybe it comes back :confused:
 
It's been sat on this noise margin for 4-5 months though and nothing has happened? I'm back now on the setup I have been on since everything went downhill in January.
 
Just run the BT speed test.

It has reported a download speed of 339kbps on an IP Profile of 500kbps.

This seems worse than useless. I might as well just use my mobile phone :(
 
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