Problem with Broadband - BT stumped

OK, just had 5 minutes of broadband unable to connect.  It tends to be worst in the afternoon.  Usually good in the evening, at night and in the early morning.  Phone line sounds like the ocean getting louder and louder and then a crack and all quiet again.  Why the BT engineers test couldn't detect this I guess is just down to bad timing...

I had a period of problems when the local download/upload speeds where increased <5Mb/s to >12Mb/s.  It went on for best part of 1 year,  sometimes it would be trouble free for weeks,  then some days it dropped numbers of times. The call centre - as helpful as they are trained to be - were useless & under threat of cancellation I insisted an engineer call - free of the normal engineer visit charge.

He removed all the wires strung around the house that they had rigged over the years to supply the wired phones & separate fax service in different rooms, thereby reducing the wall socket count to one.   He replaced the standard wall socket & hanging filter blob & fitted an intergrated socket/filter.  

He had the exchange back off the line speed limit setting it to less than the maximum (???) Not sure what/if that is an accurate description.  My limit is now set at 15Mb/s & I should be able to get >18Mb/s.  

It fixed it,  what actually fixed it I am not too sure. However when my son had BT Infinity installed he had a lot of troubles initially.  The engineer eventually spotted the hub was installed on an extension & not the 1st socket in the chain.  The socket was removed so only one was on the line & that fixed it.  - Kinda similar to my problem

Hi Richard, Im afraid I dont have any answers for you, but I just wanted to comment on the subject also.

Whilst my connection doesnt sound anywhere near as variable as yours, some days my connection is up and down like a yo-yo.

When I do the Speedcheckers, it is generally pretty poor when these incidents are occurring.

But I can see from the test that it is fluctuating quite a lot, and the Speedcheckers tend to take the reading at the end of the download for the download speeds.

And of course whenever I speak to my ISP (BT), they check the line and remarkably can find nothing wrong......

I was wondering maybe if there is such a thing as a line monitor that records the connection over a set time period, for example, that could be used to present in evidence to the HelpDesk people who can never find anything wrong?

I live a little in the sticks and there is no near future plan for our exchange to get fibre broadband unfortunately, so Im just thinking ahead!

But good luck with your irritating problem though, hope you can get some resolution soon.

When the last Broadband engineer was here he accessed a log that showed the times the connection dropped - he was quite alarmed by how many times and how often, which is why he reckoned it must be a problem with the phone line.  Hence why the BT engineer came today (eventually).  Unfortunately the ball is now back in BT Broadband's court...

I should just add that when all is working OK the broadband speed is good - the Broadband engineer measured it at around 5-6mb/s. He also disabled a rather nasty little BT feature that automatically lowers your speed every time you have a drop - the assumption being that too much speed is often the problem (!).  It wasn't in our case but before the BTBB engineer came last year our broadband was not just dropping regularly but glacially slow when it was working. Turned out the limiter at the exchange was still enabled for our line.  It's much quicker now and stays quick but the problem of dropped BB remains.

I had a similar problem with Virgin. The engineer who came to fix it found an attenuator, 10db I think, between the cable and modem. He'd not seen one before and removing it cured the problem.

The engineer told me how to check the modems performance.

Log onto modem, IP address 192.168.100.1 (User name "root" password "root")

Check Downstream Receive Power Level. Should be -12 to +12 dBmV

Check Downstream SNR. Should be >30 dB

Check Upstream transmit Power Level. Should be 30 - 55 dBmV

Probably not helpful to you Richard, but maybe Virgin users may find it useful. If you could find how to do this with your modem, you could check levels before and after dropouts

At the moment my modem's with tolerance.

One of my geeky young colleagues told me that BT had far too many customers to be able to provide a good broadband line to all at the same time, so some would need to have their connection signal strength deliberately weakened in order to provide others with better connection speeds. I don’t know if there is any truth to this theory.

I need to press my BT hub reset button ever few hours or so, and if leave my putor on and unattended for more than 10 minutes i will often find a need to press the reset again.

But whenever i’ve phoned India for help, they always resort to doing some kind of communication with my local switchboard which cures the problem and things go at fantastic speed for a few days before… slugging …up …again.

Debs

Mike, thanks.  Yes, we've been there.  Engineer that came last year changed the main socket to one that means no more filters having to hang off the extensions and router is plugged directly into that main socket.  Things ran tickety while he was there.  One or two drops, but he said that would happen while it all "stabilised"...  Only comment he made that was a concern was that he noticed that there was periodically noise on the line that was above recommended level.  He said that might trip the box into dropping and then trying to reconnect.  He also said he would report a home visit and line check  by a BT engineer, and that's what we've just had today.  Mind you, I had to go through a bit of pain before they agreed.  Doubtless thanks to "no fault found" I'll probably be charged for the visit, so more arguments to come there.  The engineer did say though that he would put the possibility of REIN on his report.

FC, thanks.  The BTBB engineer who visited last year showed me all the modem admin areas and so I can check out what's going on.  Noise varies but otherwise all looks fine and speed (now delimited) is fine too.  But it just keeps dropping, and sometimes can take 5-10 minutes to re-connect, often only to drop again straight away.  Trouble is with the box is that when it drops it automatically directs you to the idiots guide so locks you out of the admin panel until BB is back up so it's sometimes hard to see what's going on once a drop occurs.  Genius...

Debs, sounds like you still have the limiter on.  The phone opertaors seem to be able to raise the speed to max but then the automatic limiting begins to kick in bit by bit agin until eventually you're back to a crawll.  Argue hard enough and get an engineer round and they can lift this for you.  They won't do it unless you make a big fuss.  Naughty, but I guess the infrastructure couldn't cope if everyone had max speed.  Every month or two the BB in the local exchange goes down.  I'm told the boards tend to get fried as they get way too hot.

It's pretty poor state of affairs I agree, but it should be sorted. Noise on the line is a pain to find if indeed it is that, I have a noisy line sometimes usually after rain.

I know that this will the kiss of death , but I have had very little BT BB trouble, the latest HH4 takes a bit longer to "sync". I can't say I've noticed any drops although recent hiccups on 320K radio Paradise maybe something? Over the years BT Home Hubs have been really stable especially HH2 onward.

I hope you get sorted soon.

Debs

It is true. Virgins terms and conditions or similar, state, if demand is high and the system can't supply everybody with the speed they've paid for, the people with high download speeds will have their speed cropped, but those with low download speeds won't have their speed cropped.

Seems fair enough to me.

One of the good things living in Edmonton I get 20mbs download and 2mbs upload and get a reasonable responce on my Mac mini server for my websites.

Tim

Richard,

10 - 20 drops a day isn't too bad?  It shouldn't  be dropping that much in a year.   My BT Infinitiy connection has dropped once in the 6 months since I got it.   60mb down and 9mb up. 

Given I work for a major European Telco (not called BT), feel free to drop me an email and I will see if I can get you some diagnostic help from some people that really know about this stuff. 

Of course it may not be in English! :-)

cheers

jim

Hi Richard,

Do you have any other devices connected to the phone line ?  My SKY sat tv box caused similar issues while it was connected to our line..disconnecting it resulted in stable BB

I feel quite sure you have an intermittent line fault.

Noise on the line, dropping Internet connection etc. is exactly what I'm getting on a site I'm currently working on.

We are about to have new cabling run back to the BT cabinet on the street as part of our renovation plans and hope this will resolve the issue.

Regarding monitoring the line over a long period, I once had a series of "phantom calls" in the early hours but dialling "1471" showed that no one had called. At the time, I had a Toshiba phone system PBX exchange installed and thought it might be that.

After several months (and broken nights sleep) the Toshiba engineers hooked up a laptop to monitor ALL activity. It turned out that there was a BT test call coming in at various times, which would not even be noticed on a normal household line, but on a PBX system, caused it to "ring".

BT agreed to put a stop to all such automated tests on our line & the "phantom calls" stopped.

Now whilst the above possibly doesn't relate directly to your problem, I suspect you could have a monitor set up on a laptop to record exactly what is going on.

I should add that in another house, a new router sorted the drop out in BT broadband connection.

Hi Richard,

I had a similar problem for 2-3 years with BT with the following symptoms:

-Cracking and excessive noise on the line during telephone calls

-Phone calls would invariably drop out the Broadband connection

-Broadband connection was intermittent and would drop out often

The issue with BT was that they initially immediately classify the problem as either a phone problem or a broadband problem, and it thereafter gets allocated to the 'appropriate' department.  Their line tests also invariably showed no problem.

I had 2-3 engineers visit over the few years, and following a similar process of changing the in-house wiring, master socket etc, only at the third visit did the engineer do a full line test, from the exchange to the 'green box' a few streets away, from there to the telegraph pole at the end of the street, and from there to my house.  Having spent most of they day testing, he eventually surmised that the connection from the green box to the telegraph pole was suspect, and swapped my line to the 'only remaining pair of wires' available.

That finally cured the problem.

It's interesting that my problems began shortly after my neighbour (a rented house) had a phone line connected and BT requested that they extend the line to my house (there are two twisted pair lines in each black insulated line from the telegraph pole), using the spare pair of lines on my line.

For me, the countless phone calls really didn't go any way to resolving the issue.  They were merely a means to getting the correctly qualified and motivated individual to my house.  Once you have such an individual turn up, I would do everything to appeal to him to 'try everything'! For example, is there another spare pair of lines in your cable?  Is there another pair available to try from the exchange to the 'green box'....?  If there are no faults showing, this process of trial and error could reveal where the problem is.

I appreciate your frustration, for me there was no prospect of changing supplier as they'd likely have pointed to BT's lines being the problem etc etc, so I was caught in a loop of putting up with it for a while, and then beginning the endless process of calling, being put through to countless departments who'd reassure me with their sincere apologies that i should not worry, we're going to sort everything out for you..... AAAAaaaaarrrggghhhhh!!!!

Finally, I recall that there was a UK number you could call for technical assistance which would circumvent the call centre in India.  This gets around the 'question list' and stock responses to your problems, and allows you to speak in plain terms about the experiences you've having.  This is essential to getting allocated the right level of support more quickly.

Good luck.

Phil

Richard your problems sound very similar to ours (noise, frequency of drops, etc) I've scanned the replies quickly to see if anyone suggests a similar remedy, and I can't see a similar one so here's my 2p.

The drop-outs have been eliminated from our system by setting up the router with a lower level of security handshaking. I can't remember exactly what it was or how to access the router's settings ATM but our routers are probably different anyway! There may be settings that allow a lower level of security for internet, if you can lower it see if that works for starters. Others may have a better idea of what I'm on about and be able to guide you with more alacrity!

Thanks all - I'll keep on it.  I'll have another play with the modem settings but might buy a new modem and see whether it can deal with the issue a bit better than the BT supplied Homehub.

Phil, that's very interesting.  The only other house that shares the line from the road is the next door cottage.  They have no problems, so they say.  That is why my suspicion lies with the last stretch to the house where the line splits between us and the cottage.  The cottage had its line from that pole to upgraded about 10 years ago and I think that's when the line here started to get really noisy.  The engineer that came yesterday did a line test from here back to the exchange and said it all checked out OK.  However, I think if he'd kept testing for an hour or two problems would have cropped up, but he wasn't prepared to do that.

Some useful resources to help crack this type of problem

The forums on ThinkBroadband web site

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/

Also at this site is a monitor that you can use to lokk for drop outs of service go to the bottom of the page and look at the Broadband Ping Monitoring facility this will give you proof of poor service as you can look back at previous days service and also screen grab the images to send to your ISP and BT.

I have had variants of the problems described, causes of the problems included using unpaired cables, corroded cable at junctions. 

OK, an update...

Another BT engineer came to visit.  This time I managed to persuade him to stay and test the line for longer.  All looked OK until after a while and a further test he mentioned that something had come up about 700 metres down the line.  He left a box with a tone on it connected into our main socket and set off to go and check down the line. He was gone for about an hour and when he returned he said he found a junction box and when he went to check the terminals inside they disintegrated in his hand.  He cleaned up the corrosion, changed the terminals for new ones and immediately we have much clearer phone line and so far broadband drops are greatly reduced.  A result.  However I find it pretty astonishing that it has taken so long and with so many engineer visits to find something that should have been discovered straight away.  If there's a problem, always first check the connections!

Richard,

I'm really pleased that you've made some progress. Again, for me the key was to get the right engineer to my house, and get them suitably engaged to want to resolve it once and for all, almost a professional/personal pride issue.

Hopefully this will fix it?

Phil

Glad your very frustrating problem appears like it may have been finally solved Richard.

Several years ago, when we had our business office at home, we had a very similar set of symptoms with the 'phone and broadband. An engineer visited and it turned out I had inadvertently made a wrong connection somewhere when plugging all the computer stuff together. This had caused an earthing fault on the line which gave rise to the problem. Significantly it was also affecting other people's lines in our area! The engineer called unsolicited by us as a result of complaints from other users, and they had traced the fault to our property.

Now I'm not suggesting for a second that you have made a wrong connection anywhere, but it does appear that if anyone else in your vacinity had done so, or had done anything that may give rise to an earth fault on the line, then it could well affect your service in the way that you describe. Presumably BT would be able to detect and trace this, but with BT who knows?! May also depend on the experience/skills of the particular engineer involved.

Just something to consider if problems should persist......

Peter

Richard if you did some time the service department at NAIm them you should know that intermittent faults are the most difficult to track down. Bearing in mind there are maybe several miles of cable going back to the exchange and maybe 4-6 different connections just on the the cables to the exchange, plus stuff inside. 

Like most companies the clock watchers have determined ahead of time how long a fault takes to fix and the guys get that time allotted so it is very difficult to get them to spend the extra time. There were special fault teams that used to take on long term faults, but of course these have been dropped /severely cutback due to the bean counters.

Creating a complaint is a good way of attracting attention.

Hopefully you wont need to resort to the last method as they seem to have found a possible source of your ails. Now maybe I can get them to find the noise on my line as it's only a kilometre or so to the fibre box so shouldn't be too difficult, ha ha!