Automatic line testing? Slightly long but a simple question at the end.

[newshound]

I live 500 metres from an ADSL 2+ exchange. But that is at the other side of the town centre, and I could belive my actual wiring run is longer, also the phone lines in our street (most of the buildings pre-date Faraday) are not good: noisy and prone to disappearing in wet weather.

For far too long I have been putting up with 800 kb/s. But, I have two land lines at the moment and have just got a Plusnet account set up on the other one, and they forecast 18 to 20 Mb/s. When it first turned on I was getting 9 Mb/s but the IP Profile was rapidly turned down to 250 kb/s giving me typically 200.

Of course I have Plusnet on the case, the profile is back up to 11.8 Mb/s and interleaving is due to come on any time now. Plusnet seem to be doing all the right things. I'm not particularly asking about the technicalities of ADSL, just including detail to provide the overall picture.

I suspect there is still something fundamentally wrong with the wiring before the master socket. Although I am getting 11 Mb/s as indicated by the testers most of the time, I have had at least two periods of half an hour or more in the past three days where the speed has dropped to essentially nothing (although the sync light was still showing on the router). Also, even when the testers are showing a decent download and upload rate there are times when it takes 10 - 20 seconds to get the first loading of a normally fast site like Google or the BBC, and often

5 - 10 seconds for each link (again on normally responsive sites like eBay and Amazon).

For house layout reasons the new router is in the hall at the moment, and not particularly accessible for testing, but I have an XP netbook there temporarily with a cable connection to the router, which goes straight into the master socket with the faceplate removed. And I *do* have a filter. I'd rather not cable the router into the "main" house network until I am confident that the new line is useable. If I can't get at least one of them working I'm tempted to dump both the land lines and go over to 3G for data (which is normally fast and reliable).

What I would like to do is to check the line status automatically, say by loading a site every few minutes and logging the result (to simulate normal internet use). If I could actually run a speed test that would be nice, but not essential. I havn't done any real coding since the 1980s (FORTRAN, BASIC, and Pascal) so I am not up to speed with modern tools.

But I don't think it would take me long to write something *if I knew the best place to start*. Any suggestions (preferably free or open source, but I don't mind paying reasonable prices if there is something which will do the job. I'd prefer to run it on the XP box but I do have an iPad and a (low spec) Android tablet if there are any apps which do this already.

TIA

[Flop]

To comment on the first part of your question, I suspect that poor wiring/terminals between exchange and house is far more common than suspected.

If there is a problem with line speed, the reaction of Openreach is always to start with the master socket and assume that there is a problem on your side.

My Plusnet home page quotes:

"Estimated line speed: 47Mb (Accurate to within +/- 1Mbit)"

"Current line speed: 31.2 Mb "

[Profile is actually 24.7Mbps]

At one point my speed was down to a consistent 15Mbps.

Plusnet sent an engineer out. "It's your router. Can't be working properly."

Disconnected and bypassed the router. No different.

Eventually the fourth engineer went outside. "Its your dropwire". That did make a difference.

He also looked at the pole wiring. "Aluminium".

So I gather that 'estimate' refers to a calculated value based on best conditions.

Either BT have no idea what state their wiring is - or they will not inform ISPs.

Flop

[Graham J]

newshound wrote: [snip]

Google for RouterStats. Buy or borrow a router that will work with it. You can then log sync speed and SNR margin.

Every ISP I have dealt with, and every router I have used, has suffered at times from a problem that results in almost negligible download speed. At these times the routers report the same sync speed, SNR margin, and loop loss as they normally show when working at full performance.

Pinging a website such as

results in a groups of a few replies interspersed with a dozen or more failures.

If the router is configured to respond to pings and the ISP provides a static IP address, pinging the router from elsewhere on the internet shows the same intermittent replies.

I use a script running on an old PC to monitor a couple of dozen client routers. Generally these routers reply to ping during the working day, but sometimes several of them (not necessarily geographically associated) will fail to respond for an hour or more during the midnight to 6am period. I imagine this is because BT are working on their network.

Sometimes, after a significant break in connectivity overnight, a router will exhibit the intermittent ping response; and the user will report inability to get most websites.

Rebooting the router always restores normal performance.

---------------

Plusnet should be able to show you a log of all the disconnections. If there are more disconnections than one or two a week (excluding extenuating curcumstances such as nearby lightning) then Plusnet should accept that there is a reliability problem, and get Openreach out to investigate.

[Martin Brown]

Before you write anything see if routerstats lite (free) will shed any more info or the more detailed German one whose name escapes me. Check out the thread in uk.telecom.broadband about signal to noise diurnal variation for chapter and verse on available diagnostics and their interpretation. Basically check what sync speed you are getting and how many of each sort of errors or line drops.

Also keep an eye out for OpenReach vans. Round here they break an ADSL connection for every one they fix - at least it feels like that!

Regards, Martin Brown

[Peter]

Take a look at JD's auto speed tester at

I have this checking my line every 30 minutes but I believe it can operate more frequently if required. Sits in the background.

Peter

[newshound]

Thanks, that looks like *exactly* what I want. The RouterTec link suggested elsewhere is obviously a mine of information too, probably a bit more than I need!

[John Rumm]

It can be instructive to look at the CRC error rate in these cases. Sometimes you can get a rapid throughput of errored frames and not much else.

[Peter Crosland]

Re post your question in the plusnet.service.customer-feedback where there is plenty of expertise. You need to do some basic checks in a systematic maner to solve your problem.

[alan]

Another vote for Router Stats lite, which is run on your PC continually logging sync speed and line noise as reported by your router.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Martin Brown escribió:

DMT.

[Brian Gaff]

I have increasingly noticed even on my cable connection that some sites take time or slow right down and stop. Using traces it is often outside of the isps network where the problems occur. the BBC seem particularly prone to this. I guess it is some function of general loading. Not techy enough to go much further as one tends to find everyone blames everyone else when things do not run smoothly! Brian

[Man at B&Q]

I just hope they are nothing like Talk Talks call centre "basic checks in a systematic manner".

I kne exactly what was wrong and that the tests I was being asked to do were worthless. Luckily, Talk Talk have a clue and their UK tech people monitor their forums and pick issues up.

MBQ

[newshound]

I admit I havn't checked that out, but the JDAST is very easy to install and set up, and that showed three times overnight where the upload test timed out from no response, while the downloads were going (sort of) OK.

[F]

You might find it useful to subscribe to plusnet.service.customer-feedback and post your query on there. Plusnet regularly check and help.

[Plusnet Support Team]

They'll be the usual checks to rule out anything the customer's side of the master socket. Sounds to me like this has already been done though if we're 'seem to be doing all the right things'.

We monitor our forums too -

As well as the rest of the Internet (Usenet included) ;)

[F]

And they pop up here as well! Nice one Bob!

[alexd]

I'm running dmt-ux once an hour from cron:

I fully intend to stitch the frames together into an animation at some point, but haven't got the appropriately shaped tuit.

Also, I wrote a script for Munin that fetches sync, attenuation, power and margin data from my Thomson router; this is graphed by Munin every 5 minutes.

If you want to measure the actual throughput of the line, there are tools like iperf than can be driven from a script/cron job/Scheduled Task, etc, but you'd need another endpoint to run iperf to. I don't know how you would go about scripting one of those Flash-based internet speed tests. Auto-It, perhaps?