OT: Myth or true

[Steve Firth]

The exchange is unmanned. My ISP didn't notice until I called them to report a problem.

[Adam Funk]

Well, I meant the exchange system, not the night watchman monitoring the blinkenlights!

I shouldn't be surprised, but it ought to be possible to spot the "noisy & intermittent" effect among different endpoints in the same area.

[Adam Funk]

I'd think the software somewhere in the system ought to know which network endpoint has which address ... but the ISP & exchange operator would both have to be motivated to worry about such things, I suppose.

[Thumper]

This is the reply I got earlier when I posed the same question to my ISP's Support Forum;

"That is a Myth for sure. Don't believe it. Yes it would be right if it was a DSL Line as the line would then need to find a better signal/quality line."

That was from a tech wizard, but they are not an employee of VM.

[Peter Crosland]

If the modem will not stay operational without regular rebooting then there is a fault with the modem or the line.

[Sam Plusnet]

Virgin? Is this a cable or an ADSL modem?

[Martin Brown]

Nothing bad would surprise me where TalkTalk is concerned.

A fairly simple test is to use routerstats lite to monitor signal to noise and then try power cycle syncing at best and worst times of day.

This is complete and utter rubbish unless you have an exceptionally badly designed cheapo modem and a crap ISP to go with it.

All my modems since 1998 onwards have run continuously without any need to reboot regularly. I actually wished I had paid more attention to my first ever broadband modem as I found that the label on the PSU had begun to char after four years of continuous use.

The current one is faster and marginally less stable than its predecessors and very occasionally (so far once in 3 months) has lost routing to the internet whilst maintaining sync. Most times this sort of fault has happened it has been the ISPs DNS that had failed and putting a known numerical dotted quad in would bring up a website.

All other ADSL faults have been physical damage to the phone line by falling trees, flooding or hedge flailers trashing the junction box.

Regards, Martin Brown

[Brian Gaff]

If its a bt type one, ie operating on the twisted pair modes, and not the Infinity type cable stuff, then yes, any interference to the router will put it back in traning mode. How much this affects speed and how long this problem occurs is different for every line.

Brian

[Scott M]

And your point is? Hualingan. Thompson. TalkTalk. Hardly obscure names.

I've also come across more than one modem/router (one was a BT job) with the option to automatically reboot itself at regular intervals specifically to keep up the performance.

Scott

[Man at B&Q]

Arse covering.

MBQ

[The Natural Philosopher]

indeed. its not just modeming, Its NATING and routing. memory leaks in the firmware ...is one mode of degradation.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Interesting discussion... I'm a long way from the exchange on a slowish (1Mb) internet connection

- Netopia router is on 24/7. Downloaded the RouterStats Lite software - and left it running...

Over the last day or so it's recorded noise margins between 6dB and 10dB

- would you expect the Noise Margin to vary like this - or is this something to bother the ISP about ??

Thanks Adrian

[The Natural Philosopher]

no this is normal.

I get 3dB variation between night and day and that's on a shorter line. there is also a mild correlation with weather. Remeber ADSL is in the MW/LW AM band, and think back to how propagation varies at night for those radio bands,

[Adrian Brentnall]

Ah - OK - thanks! Other info from the router - Line State Up Modulation DMT Data Path Interleave Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1024 128 SN Margin (dB) 9.50 18.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 59.50 31.50 CRC Errors 27253 556

All Greek to me!

Suffering DSL-envy at the moment .... the B/band connection in the shop is rattling along at 5 meg or thereabouts - makes this line look positively prehistoric...

Thanks

[The Natural Philosopher]

Hmm something odd there. You seem to not be on ADSL2 at all. But a fixed rate 1MPS service.

but 59.5dB is a high attenuation.

Even so this

suggests you should be able to get 448 up. 2.7Mbps down (raw) . with a

2Mbps BRAS on 20CN.

I think you should talk to your ISP. Get yourself on a rate adapted service

Interestingly your line is about where mine was before I had problems. getting the line remade (every joint) and careful selection of 'best copper' and a new better chipped router got me to over 6Mbps. I lost about 2,5dB attenuation, and at this sort of line length that makes a HUGE difference.

[Dave Liquorice]

Different terminal kit between ADSL and VDSL of BT Infinity (Fibre To The Cabinet) but the physical connection is still as twisted pair for both.

No, training mode lasts for the first ten days for a new install. Once it is over it can only be started again, manually by BT or an ISP with a clue.

If a line gets it's speed knocked back due to noise or a fault how long it takes to recover once the noise/fault has been cleared and a "normal" sync rate has been established is variable. The method used has changed, it used to take up to 72 hrs no matter how big the difference between the knocked back BRAS rate and the new stable sync rate was. These days the size of that difference is taken into account and the bigger it is the quicker the BRAS is revised, it can now recover in just a few hours for a "large" difference, say a few Mbps.

[Adrian Brentnall]

Yes - I think that's the deal I'm signed up to - max 1mps.... To be honest, I can just about live with that - it's the upload speed, that's reporting 0.10Mb/s on the speedtest sites, that's a bit tedious - especially when uploading websites or emailing large photos...

I believe we're about 5km from the exchange.... and possibly on some not-very-recent copper!

Doesn't seem to be an option The engineer who came out a few months ago (we'd had a lightning strike on the pole down the road which had fried the terminals in the junction box up the pole) reckoned that we could pay a bit more and aspire to 2mb

- but he reckoned that, in 'real life' we'd not get much above the 1mb (he had a blackberry and was able to run various live tests on the line). The 2mb package only promises the same 128k up-speed.

How did you manage to get them to do that for you ?

[Martin Brown]

Perhaps not; but utterly crap products if they behave as you describe!

BT just badges someone elses gear made to a lowest common denominator and price. They all tend to default to exactly the same channel round here leaving various neighbours fighting each other for airspace. Hardly what you would call a good engineering design.

At least today they have stopped shipping them with no encryption, well known default admin passwords and broadcasting model number as SSID.

Regards, Martin Brown

[The Natural Philosopher]

well you will get 448k if you go for an 'up to 8' service.

he is talking bollocks, and 5 year old bollocks at that. With that line attenuation you are definitely on for about 3Mbps down 448kbps up raw speed. And you should not be paying more - if you are, change ISP's

I had an intermittent fault which was probably at the exchange. I reported a voice fault first, and plied the engineer with coffee and expensive cakes and he spend 2 hours remaking and selecting best lines from the house to the main trunk. When that didn't fix the problem I reported a broadband fault, and a second engineer also suitably bribed, put me on the best pair from trunk to exchange. The problem persisted for a few more days and then vanished, leaving me with a circuit capable of about 85% more than it ever had.

[Adrian Brentnall]

I should have said the this is (rural) Ireland, not the UK..... possibly a different situation wrt the telecomms infrastructure.

There's not a wide choice of ISPs either - if it's wired then you're pretty much stuck with Eircom (think BT in the 1980's!) wireless options are available, but tend to be less reliable than the Eircom landline. We did have a brief flirtation with an 'alternative' wired supplier - but they turned out to be totally useless at getting faults fixed, as they simply passed the fault on to Eircom, who seemed to shuffle it to the bottom of their 'to-do' list - so, in the interests of reliability we went back to Eircom.

They're currently rolling out a product they're calling NGB (next generation broadband) which claims 'up to 8gb' - but is only available in certain areas.

A cunning plan, my lord! Well done! The local engineers are good enough, and can be persuaded to go a little beyond their brief, - but, like Scotty, they're constrained by the laws of physics and 40-year-old line-cabling... so there's only so much that you can get them to do.

The one thing I've not yet tried is to connect the TA straight to the master socket - but the internal house wiring isn't all that old (6 years) - so I'm not expecting dramatic improvements by trying that..

As I say - I can live with just under a gig download - but it'd be nice to see the bits scurrying up the line just a little bit faster than

0.09mps Had some big files to send during the week so I just waited til I was shop-sitting on Thursday with my laptop - and squirted them down the shop's broadband - which worked well enough..

It's probably just one of those things!

Thanks Adrian