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FTTC dropping: four Openreach engineers and no closer to resolving the issue

Well it was all going so well and this weekend it's started dropping again :(

Re-raised with TalkTalk.

I do know someone who has VDSL in the village, quite near to you.

I shall ask them if their connection keeps dropping out - though, they may not notice speed variation so much. They only had 1 Meg down before.
 
Not entirely clear..

Hi Mark have not experienced any noticeable drop out although have wondered occasionally whether they might be doing a new connection at the box as it seems to have dropped for a couple of minutes then comes back.

One thing which I did find out talking to [someone else in the village] is that he did not have the engineer visit the house only made the new connection at the box whereas the engineer came and fitted a new faceplate where the phone line enters the house.

Hope that helps.

Just a quick question regarding your fibre to the cabinet broadband service, on behalf of someone else who also has it, but who experiences regular connection drop-outs..

Does yours do this e.g. go away completely albeit for only brief periods; have you had anyone look at it if so?

Thanks,
Mark
 
I doubt there will be much link between connections if I'm honest.

The ports in the cabinet are fine. Indeed I've been on two or three different ones and the issue occurs.

I believe it to be REIN somewhere along the line between us and the cabinet which Openreach are investigating.
 
Did you get it fixed?

Cabinet 3 has run out of "capacity". You couldn't make it up ;)

It's odd since I thought it was one of those big fat 288 line (?) cabinets and there aren't 288 lines, probably more like 170 at the most.

I was having a look for someone in the village, and got this:

"FTTC is currently not available on this cabinet due to following reasons:- Sorry your cabinet is temporarily unavailable, capacity will be restored as soon as possible."

I know the ADSL speeds round here are a joke and I'm sure a fair few people have taken VDSL but this seems a bit odd.
 
The cabinet has about 40 lines available out of a 288 total, so that lack of capacity notice is complete fiction.
 
The REIN team have been out all this week and investigations are ongoing.

Supposedly there is a lot of REIN (perhaps even multiple sources) so I expect they may have suspended orders until the REIN issue has been solved?
 
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I wondered that. When I was looking at the ADSL stats for the lines that I have data for in the village, the normal SNR is 15db which I think is quite high and seemed to explain why many lines achieved only half the sync rate you might have expected them to.

I'd out this down to poor line quality, probably aluminium, if it was/is down to REIN, this has been a problem for years.
 
Not knowing the gae of the house/estate where you live..

I would be wary of ANY house/estate built in the mid - late 70's, as despite BTs claims, large numbers were wired with Alu. BT are very disingenuous, they state that "They" never used Alu - quite correct - they paid contractors to do it!!!

There are several estates near Malvern that were wired with Alu, to this day BT deny there is an issue, but talk to any of the engineers working in the area and they will give you a completely different story.
 
For the lines that I have the stats for - and to be fair, I suspect that people unhappy with theirs were more inclined to supply them than people who were happy, so the results may be skewed:

Rather anecdotally, three lines performed exactly as you'd expect them to for their line length indicating 'perfect copper'.

All of the others underperformed and the common theme was a high noise margin. In some cases the noise margin upstream was much higher, those being the lines with a sync rate of 256kbps upstream, so not even managing the full 1Mbps.

IIRC the noise margin on our line with ADSL was 15db and so at a total length of about 3.7km (2.5 + 1.2) the sync rate was 2Meg with an IP Profile of 1750kbps. Sort the noise margin out and the sync rate might nudge up to roughly the 5Mbps you might expect.

Near adjacent houses had wildly differing sync rates, the biggest variance being 4Mbps sync down in one place and 0.5Mbps down just 300m away. Same cabinet, different "loop".

There is a 1980s estate near us, which might very well be on the same loop as us, and so that may well have aluminium D-sides. I never did investigate further as we upgraded to 3G and got rid of the phone line altogether.

As far as I know there were never any aluminium drop wires, but there were aluminium D-sides. I had attributed the cause of the dismal performance, in part, to those.

That would drop performance hugely, but it wouldn't necessarily cause drop outs. But REIN could potentially impact those noise figures.
 
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REIN team came out yesterday and (a) source of noise has been eliminated. I am afraid that I am not able to divulge where exactly as even I am not supposed to know.

Either way, the SNR on this line immediately shot up to 7.5dB from 6dB and I would expect lines nearer to the source to have even greater gains.

Either way the issue is still occuring on our line so there's more REIN (very possible I think) or there's some other issue.
 
I am sure that an Openreach engineer visits that joining box next to the pole opposite my house, every week...
 
We've had teams of people in this lane recently with cherry pickers twice fiddling around at the top of the pole/dp which seems to be related to speed issues.

I say that given that it's right outside the window, and I overheard (or could not help but overhear since it's otherwise silent here) the engineer's derogatory comments about the customer not being happy. The sheer cost of doing this again and again must more than undo the profit on a number of lines for a good few years.

I suppose, at least, dropouts are easy to prove if the session is disconnecting, since the ISP can see the reconnections from their end very clearly.
 
Usually when a speed issue is reported in my experience, Openreach come, plug in their JDSU, say it's within normal limits and then leave.
 
I suppose it depends on what is meant by "normal limits".

Here the speed estimate is 15 to 36 Meg. ISPs give an estimate of around 29 Meg.

If it were to only deliver 15 Meg then I report a fault to the ISP as it's significantly less than the estimate.

Openreach look at the estimate data, see the lower bound is 15 Meg, and declare it within normal limits under the get-out clause of "impacted line" which is to basically say "Yes, our kit is crap, but rather than fix it, we'll invoke our get-out clause and move on to the next job".
 
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Well our issue still isn't resolved, SNR is still fluctuating, granted not as much as before.

The saga continues...
 
That would give the gypsies even more of an incentive to visit.
 
Someone has suggested the above might upset some people, so I would just like to clarify that the gypsies would only be selling wooden clothes pegs.....


While their indentured, illegal, immigrant, slaves stole all the lead and copper!!!! :laugh:
 
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