Internet connection

No I don't! That is exactly how they were presented by the WAN section of my Event Log file.

Open Reach expected tomorrow afternoon!

One of the guys at work (my immediate manager), his ADSL problems were caused where the cable passed through the house foundation. There was some sort of problem there, with the short section of cable.

My ADSL problems here, were caused by corrosion on all the RJ-11 boxes at carpet level. Removal of the entire "spiders web" of internal house telephone wiring, and running a single cable from demarc to computer room, fixed it. Crackles can easily come from a bad RJ11 box. Crackles can come from a bad hook switch.

By comparison, the outside wiring is in quite good shape. When they make connections, they use gel-crimps and gas-tight connections in the punch-down blocks. The s*it in your house is not passivated in any way, there is no attention to detail in the consumer goods part of telephony.

I have a whole-house filter, about 3"x2"x0.5" and the POTS (unused) comes out of one connector hole, the ADSL for upstairs comes from the other. This avoids the nuisance of "filter-per" setups and needing four filters upstairs. The quality of the filtering should be the same (high-pass above 8KHz for ADSL). A whole house filter should be used on your "high rate" ADSL2.

Yes, you can have cross-talk, but that is not likely at POTs frequencies. If the elderly resident is a contributor, perhaps the two of you are sharing the same wire pair. Or there is a DC leakage path between pairs. The DC is part of a signaling scheme, for hook-flash. It is that power that allows "passive" handsets to work.

I'm including the diagram, to show the concept involved, to tweak memory. I don't know how yours is wired.

RJ11 X X Pair2 X Pair1 \___ Most households, only have one line commissioned X Pair1 / X Pair2 <=== Pair2 allows a house to have two phone circuits (at least) X There aren't normally enough wires in the overhead, for more than that.

You used to be able to buy little adapters, for adapting Pair2 to Pair1, for handsets that would only look at Pair1. Working with two pairs in a house, is the kind of nuisance you would expect.

A telephone company is only as good as their bookkeeping. The reason service requests are so slow, isn't the speed of the telephone truck. It's having to wait 24 hours for a database update, and then the next service order can be processed and a truck dispatched. The service is slow, because it is quantized around midnight database updates. To do a "null operation", to disconnect a line and reconnect it, it should take "zero time" in a modern world. In the telephony world, it takes three days, two truck rolls and the database updates each day. By doing all that s*it, this is supposed to prevent two customers from sharing the same pair. They should *never* *ever* lose control of the correctness of the wiring. That's why they put up with the overheads of doing it that way. it costs money to be that silly. To do two truck rolls, just to keep a database sane. But, that's how it works.

Another source of ADSL2 failures, is electrical-noise-on-mains. All it takes is one (quite bad) SMPS on mains, to cause thru-noise on a wall adapter into the sensitive ADSL circuits. My ADSL2 modem, used to lose sync every night at 9PM (lowest SNR). I could tell which computer was the miscreant, because of a herringbone pattern on an old analog TV set. The TV set was also affected by the noise-on-mains.

Paul

Could the line be buzzed out, from the telecom end ? As a partial check.

Some modems have a telnet interface, for dumping frequency data. Someone wrote a program "DMT" for display of the data, and versions of DMT are compiled for various models and designs. For example, if I were to upgrade the firmware on my ADSL2 modem, one of the side effects is the telnet is removed from later firmware releases (no more data interface). There was a website with copies of DMT and what models they were good for.

What I don't know, is what debug techniques are available for wringing out the line at 8KHz or lower (all the way to DC).

Paul

Paul.

Thanks for your thoughts. A 4th. telephone engineer is expected tomorrow afternoon!

A filter is incorporated in the domestic termination box. The problem persists with the domestic phone circuit unplugged.

Tests so far have discovered wet wiring in a mid-way junction box but, so far, the problem has not occurred with an engineer on site.

Changing the cable pair seems a likely solution (if they have spares).

Pretty sure the Plusnet supplied routers don't allow seeing the bits per bin info.

No matter if the problem 'doesn't show up' they should still be able to locate it. One time the fault was *in the exchange itself* with a bad connection on the wiring rack,

Its a rare feature. I had a router that did tho. D-link maybe?

Snip

Colin has just left.

Unable to find a fault with connections home to cabinet.

Has carried out a *lift and shift* operation at the exchange.

On the basis that everything else has been tried, he has arranged for Plusnet to send a replacement router.

Will leave the job open and come back tomorrow!

On 11/01/2024 17:14, Tim Lamb wrote: k,

Good. That was sensible

Getting there.

Even better.

The new router is installed. Plusnet Hub 2

Currently running at 5Mb down and 2Mb up. SNR looks much lower.

That is far too low, if SNR is low speeds should be much higher

What are the SNR figures?

Give it chance to settle down!

Currently 15Mb down and 2.0up. SNR not so easy with hub 2 as it displays data from a reset point. I think. SNR at 7.30am was 6.0 down and 16 up but more like 6.0 and 6.0 overnight.

Certainly appears more stable.

SNR should tend towards 4-6dB downstream and probably about 9-15dB upstream.

Speeds down should be in the high teens.

Fingers crossed! It seems to have settled at 14.6 down and 2.0 up. More than ample for my current needs.

Hub reports:- Signal attenuation 13.9/29.3, Line attenuation 13.8/26.5, Noise margin 15.4/6.3 (direction and units not specified)

Reading elsewhere about Open Reach recent secrecy on fibre installation planning, I am now encouraged by a hint from the engineer that spending money on a private install might be regretted.

In message <PyfOHSO6y$ snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk>, Tim Lamb snipped-for-privacy@marfordfarm.demon.co.uk> writes

Sadly too good to last:-(

Speed test this afternoon gave 0.75Mb down and zero up!

Recovered to 8.58 down and 0.65 up after 15 minutes.

The WAN section of the technical log mentions *no carrier* error but this means nothing to me. I have printed off a few pages of the WAN report in case there is anything useful.

F*ck me that's bad.

That is still s*it.

Good plan. I think the engineers need to come back again...

@Tim: Have you left the pingplotter running, it doesn't (directly) measure speed, but any pattern to the step-changes on the graph?

Andy. I didn't find pingplotter hugely instructive. Mainly because I have the PC set to save power. I'll try a couple of days permanently on and see what that shows.

Been running all morning.

Nothing exciting except when I do a speed test:-)

Packet loss 0, Jitter 35mS, latency 35mS.

Probably 1mS step changes in the latency on a very regular basis.