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Powerlines causing whole internet connection to be unstable???

Please beware that this person is a bit of a noob when it comes to networks and stuff like that so sorry if i cause any cringes during the following!

We have had fttc installed fairly recently with utility warehouse (I believe it's through talktalk) and have reached a very satisfactory speed of around 66/18-19 on speed tests. So as a result I felt like it would be best after a month or so of use (with poor reception and speed at times to the upstairs office) to get a wired connection to the office and the best solution seemed to be a powerline.

So having installed it yesterday it seemed to be working all ok but today we started noticing how unstable our whole internet connection has become. So i looked at our router stats and there seemed to be a really big number of FECs (in fact there were just as many FECs the day it was installed) which i gather are errors of some sort and what seemed strange to me was that it seemed to affect all devices, even the ones on the router wireless connection (so nothing to do with the ethernet powerline connection).

So having tried taking both the sender and receiver parts out completely the FEC count has significantly decreased as i expected however what I wanted to get someone's expertise on is whether it could possibly not be an issue with our home's mains circuit and just the way the ethernet cables have had to run or something. I would hope it isn't the house's fault as it is only around 20 years old.

https://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/products/23623-thomson-tg589vac/specifications/

This is our router supplied by UW

http://www.tplink.com/uk/products/details/cat-5034_TL-WPA4230P-KIT.html

This is the TL-WPA4230P KIT powerline stuff we're using

I'm sure there must be other info you would need but since I'm not sure what I'll supply whatever is needed later.

Cheers for any responses
 
I tend not to pay too much attention to connection errors as they don't give you the most useful feedback. It would be good to know what the other connection stats look like between your stable and the unstable broadband states.

Otherwise older powerline kit was known to cause some problems for standard ADSL / VDSL broadband connections, although the more modern AV500 standard shouldn't really be causing any issues even though it does share some of the same frequency (2-30MHz) as your FTTC/VDSL (17MHz profile) line.

Mind you there is the possibility that this combination of Powerline kit and perhaps a poorly wired home electricity circuit could be creating a problem, although identifying such things isn't easy. You can sometimes use an old style analogue radio to tune slowly through the related frequencies while listing for abnormal interference and then use that to try and spot the source, but it won't always pick-up everything.

A few years ago we moved into a new home and had it renovated, which included asking an electrician to go around and clear up all the connections, replace plug sockets and swap out the old spider junction boxes for new ones to make the circuits more stable and clean. So far I've never had a problem using powerline on FTTC/VDSL lines myself and ours is also the AV500 standard, but I do still plug the adapters into a socket that's as far away from the router as possible just to be safe. The signal is very low power so a bit of distance may help.

We could of course be barking completely up the wrong tree here.
 
Ok I'll try and get those tonight, which stats particularly would we need? Another thing I hadn't mentioned is that I had to run the ethernet cable past the back of the tv where there are numerous other wires to get to a power socket for the sender part. I do have a couple of power sockets well away from the tv which I could try the router and sender on but wouldn't be a realistic place to have it in the long term.
 
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Line stats

Here's my line stats

For these bits the first number is up and second is down

DSL Uptime
7days 1hours 56min 5sec
DSL Type
VDSL
DSL Mode
Fast
Maximum Line rate
22.08 Mbps 64.67 Mbps
Line Rate
19.99 Mbps 72.07 Mbps
Data Transferred
816.27 MBytes 1958.21 MBytes
Output Power
6.4 dBm 14.0 dBm
Line Attenuation
0.0 dB 14.0 dB
Noise Margin
12.5 dB 3.4 dB


First column = total
Second column = current quarter
Third column = previous quarter
fourth column = current day
fifth column = previous day
sixth column = since sync

Upstream FEC 10382 9 1 158 864 6793
Downstream FEC 1334724 2 4443 32101 301831 1253715
Upstream CRC 2049 2 0 24 140 1302
Downstream CRC 7260 0 0 0 45 79
Upstream ES 6310 2 0 18 117 925
Downstream ES 4638 0 0 0 3 10
Upstream SES 5 0 0 0 3 3
Downstream SES 188 0 0 0 1 1
Upstream UAS 356 0 0 0 0 0
Downstream UAS 501 0 0 0 0 0
Upstream LOS 0 0 0 0 0 0
Downstream LOS 2 0 0 0 0 0
Upstream LOF 0 0 0 0 0 0
Downstream LOF 16 0 0 0 0 0
Upstream LOM 0 0 0 0 0 0
Downstream LOM 0 0 0 0 0 0

This is everything i have as far as i can see, hope this helps
 
Just moved the router and sender part over to a couple of power sockets away from the tv and it has come up with these stats

DSL Uptime
11min 15sec
DSL Type
VDSL
DSL Mode
Fast
Maximum Line rate
20.63 Mbps 64.38 Mbps
Line Rate
19.99 Mbps 62.42 Mbps
Data Transferred
76.96 MBytes 295.5 MBytes
Output Power
4.6 dBm 14.1 dBm
Line Attenuation
0.0 dB 14.0 dB
Noise Margin
6.5 dB 6.5 dB

I know the speed is worse but does that stabilise the connection at all? Something to do with interleaving is it? As you can see its only been up for a short time but it certainly seems a solid connection. I'll try plugging it back in to where it will have to sit permanently and see if the tv and wiring with it is the issue.

Edit: Moving it back seems to have made no difference compared to being plugged in away from everything so I'll see how it goes. 60Mb+ is still plenty as long as it's stable for us, so fingers crossed it isn't dodgy circuitry in the house and just a complete restart of the router solved it!
 
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I'll ignore the Line Attenuation of 0.0 dB (upstream) as that's probably a well-known bug.

Other than that it's interesting to note how your noise margin changed from 12.5 dB (up) 3.4 dB (down) to 6.5 dB (up) 6.5 dB (down), although your download rate has also fallen so it's probably the line being adjusted to find greater stability (this may not be a result of you moving the router or powerline adapter, although it could be linked to the general disconnections).

The earlier 3.4 dB margin is a bit on the low side and some lines will be unstable at that level, which normally reflects interference on the line coming into your house rather than the TELEPHONE wiring inside the house itself. I'd watch it and see how that margin and the line's speed profile changes.

If the disconnections keep happening and you notice a trend in the noise margin and line speed profile then make a complaint to the ISP.
 
Thanks for the expertise, have been monitoring it since I last posted and when we're connected it's all good but there's been several dropouts. The line stats always reset to something very slightly different (with no trend at all, always around the same mark) so I was wondering if that could be due to UW or whoever trying to stabilise the connection or is there something on the line causing it?

I'll continue to monitor it for now and see how it goes, but would you say that these sorts of dropouts are something I'd need to go directly to UW to get to sort out?

Also just a couple of quick questions regarding our broadband, do you know for sure if talktalk is the 'owner' of our line (LLU is it) as a utility warehouse customer?

Also having looked at our line stats would you say that this is a reasonable speed/connection for 300 m from the fttc box on our street? (I measured using the google maps tool to go up our windy cul-de-sac but I guess the actual line might be slightly longer)

Edit: Losing connection very regularly at the moment, will have to get in touch with my isp. But still solid connection when it's not completely disconnected so I don't think the powerlines could be causing this, will double check though.
 
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The speeds look reasonable, but you shouldn't be suffering any drops except perhaps during very strong electrical storms. I would certainly report it and make them aware of the problem. It's probably a bad connection or some other damage (high resistance fault etc.), most likely occurring outside of your home (Openreach's realm).

Also if you have an analogue phone to test with then plug that into the master socket and see if you hear any crackling on the line. Also what kind of master socket do you have (I assuming you're plugging into the master and not an extension)? Do you know if it has a filtered faceplate?
 
Ok I'll double check the phone for crackling but it was just fine yesterday. We are plugged into the master socket but we are still on the one that was fitted with the house I guess which just has the one socket on the lower part of it and using an adsl microfilter. I have thought about getting one of those filtered faceplates but there wasn't that much differences in speed between the test socket and microfiltered connections.

When I looked this morning it had stayed up overnight (from like 11 last night). So do you think it could be related to congestion on our line or something?

My plan though is to take out the powerlines over the weekend if it's still playing up and test that out because it just seems too much of a coincidence that this has started happening when we've fitted these up.
 
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