Hi Matthew or Mand......

...I would welcome it if you could look at my ticket ID: 30838131

I am worried that "your team" are wishing this would go away but I sincerely hope there is something that can still be done or should I be emailing Ian Livingston in last ditch desperation :lol:

TIA for your time & additional insight.

Hi Routefinder,

I've had a look at this with one of our faults experts, basically the line has no interleaving and is just about struggling to keep your current speed with a downstream SNR of 14dB. I suspect that turning interleaving back on, if you're amenable to this, will get you back up to around the 3Mb you were enjoying previously.

If you're happy to give this a go please let me know and I'll get the order placed for you, if not then I'll see what else we can do.

Regards,

Matthew Taylor
Plusnet Customer Support

Just to add to what you say orbrey , very few people seem to realise that in general interleaving does not decrease the sync speed, but at any given sync/profile on dodgy lines it will increase actual download speed by hugely reducing retransmissions.

That's the whole point of it! (As I'm sure you know but few users do).

In fact if a lot of packets are needing retransmission then the low latency of Fast Path is also probably compromised.

Bob's broadband basic info/help site:
www.robertos.me.uk
ISP history: Demon dialup >> Freeserve dialup >> BT Broadband >> Prodigynet >> Newnet >> O2 Standard.
Purple Cloud for domain, email and web space.

In reply to a post by orbrey:

Hi Routefinder,

I've had a look at this with one of our faults experts, basically the line has no interleaving and is just about struggling to keep your current speed with a downstream SNR of 14dB. I suspect that turning interleaving back on, if you're amenable to this, will get you back up to around the 3Mb you were enjoying previously.

If you're happy to give this a go please let me know and I'll get the order placed for you, if not then I'll see what else we can do.

Hi Matthew

Many thanks for the very prompt attention.

Can I clarify something? AFAIK Interleaving is imposed "normally" if the DLM deems a line to be too noisy ~ yes? Well my line even when reset to 6db is as far as I understand not very noisy at all and I think the last time Interleaving was applied (this was in the old problem ticket I had previously mentioned) it did not help at all in any significant manner!!! So a moot point that 'now' it will somehow miraculously lift my speed to such a revived level.

I therefore (banging my head against the nearest wall ;~) ) ask again what is it about the actual line that changed in March 2008 that dropped my speed & increased the margin so badly? Now I know I am only one small voice in the BT universe but in purely empirical test terms when will they stop relying on automation and allow the logical steps of trying a new "pair" (granted this will most likely be in the same cable bundle) and/or new card connection and then if that does not help go about identifying where in the line betwixt me and the exchange where the line is failing to maintain the original level of connection even when low(ish) noise and stable connection is possible.

For the record the current connection has been up over 9 days and the Errored Seconds count is 8044 and Severe ES 62 as I understand it these figures are extremely low and even when during the retrain recently they never reached significant levels ~ are we talking about the same line when your "faults" colleague says the line is struggling???

To summarise, no I do not wish Interleaving to turned on but would really like it to be escalated to BT with more specific requests for answers (to the above) and a statement of when they will get out of the "automation says this about your line, therefore we can do no more" mindset and actually go investigate what happened and what they will do about restoration of the original service.

I await with anticipation what can be done next???

TIA

Hi Routefinder,

The trouble is it's just put down to the line degrading, and the automatic systems are in place in order that lines can adapt to that.

We can't actually get the line fixed as there's nothing to fix - it's working within acceptable parameters, even if those have changed from previously.

The only options we have are to reset the SNR and reinitiate the 10 day training period, and to apply interleaving which as I said previously should give you an increase in speed. I don't think you'll see the same kind of problems you did two years ago.

Regards,

Matthew Taylor
Plusnet Customer Support

In reply to a post by orbrey:

Hi Routefinder,

The trouble is it's just put down to the line degrading, and the automatic systems are in place in order that lines can adapt to that.

We can't actually get the line fixed as there's nothing to fix - it's working within acceptable parameters, even if those have changed from previously.

The only options we have are to reset the SNR and reinitiate the 10 day training period, and to apply interleaving which as I said previously should give you an increase in speed. I don't think you'll see the same kind of problems you did two years ago.

Hi Matthew

Many thanks for getting back to me

Hmmm! granted all systems can degrade, just look at the state of our roads following the recent snow, when will the councils and the government put in place a proper repair program.

So on the basis that my line is deemed to have 'normal' degradation that will probably not be remedied by renewal in my lifetime is it not possible to request a switch to another pair in hopefull expectation that that may resolve the matter in regard to reduction of service due to such degradation??? Surely not that onerous or BT costly a request! Can you at least ask for this to be tried?

If the answer to that is negative then as you indicate I am left with Hobsons Choice of reinitiate the retrain and turn Interleaving on.

Now please for my & others benefit please restate the benefits and disadvantages of using an Interleaved Path vs Fast. For the record I do not do online gaming but do use BBC iPlayer and few other streaming service like Vimeo & uTube, not forgetting online radio stations.

I really must have a chat with my nearest neighbours (a couple of which are more tech savvy) and see what their line service level is like/has been???

I wish to make as informed a decision as possible before asking you to do as suggested, as it still feels like I am quite literally paying for a degraded service that has become so through no fault of my own!!!!

Indeed if I agree to that retrain with Interleaving turned on and there is no improvement what will you do then???

TIA

PS I would welcome you copying your replies to the ticket to maintain continuity there as well

My parents have a line with plusnet. Some time ago (about 2 or 3 years) they were having a very flakey connection that kept on disconnecting. Requested that they were moved to interleaved (fast path was the default at the time) and once moved their connection became much more stable. They still have pings good enough for online gaming and the speeds have not been severely affected.

I have also just switched my Be line to interleaved and whilst the ping went up by 8ms the packet loss went from an average of about 10% to being practically zero. The actual performance of the line does seem to be a bit better on interleaved than it was on fast path (and that line connects at around 12Mbps).

Interleaved is not the big evil for most users and does, in my experience, make a more stable connection. If plusnet are willing to allow you to try it and switch back to fastpath if it doesn't work for you then personally I would go for it.

To agree with you Ian, I can't think of any reason why anyone other than a fanatic gamer would want Fast Path rather than Interleaved. The possible exception being an equally fanatic speed merchant on ADSL Max and with an 8Mbps-capable line where many connections have their maximum sync reduced from 8128kbps (7150 profile) to 7616kbps (6500 profile) by interleaving. Though in those cases the packet loss you refer to can become a counter-indicator.

Bob's broadband basic info/help site:
www.robertos.me.uk
ISP history: Demon dialup >> Freeserve dialup >> BT Broadband >> Prodigynet >> Newnet >> O2 Standard.
Purple Cloud for domain, email and web space.

I am a recent convert to the interleaving religion (and I'm not even an avid online FPS gamer). Always thought fastpath was better until the thinkbroadband quality meter came online which showed that clearly it wasn't better.

Thanks guys for the feedback ~ I await Matthews reply(ies)

But as for packet drops???

Copied here my d/s stats from RouterStats

Noise Margin: 13.6 dB
Connection Rate: 2304 Kbps
Line Attenuation: 55.0 dB
Power: 17.9 dBm
Max Rate: 2336 Kbps

SF: 65339844
SF Errors: 11735
Reed Solomon: 0
RS Corrected: 0
RS Un-Corrected: 0
HEC: 9060
Errored Seconds: 9677
Severe ES: 70

Interleave Depth: 1
Bitswaps: 0

The above is with an uptime of 12 days 20 hours + so AFAIK that is stable and not noisy indeed as far as I can recall the sort of performance I have at all Margin settings, even as low as 6db, yes the graph shows a bit of a variation at lower margins but nothing dramatic ~ typically within a approx 0.5db variance I think?