Sorry, but very disappointed

I can't blame AAISP, at least, not for the next few days, but at the present time, I am very, very disappointed in my "up to 8Mb" connection. It really needs to be named "up to, but not quite, 1.5Mb"

Having come from a fault free ISP - I didn't like where they, Nildram, were going - I opted for AAISP.

Thus far, several disconnects, lousy speeds, no contact at all from AAISP to tell me my connection was now active (I just 'guessed' from the very confusing logs on the services pages).

My previous fixed 2Mb line was absolutely rock steady and in the 1890Kbps range, constantly. Now the connection is slow, the SNR is at 6 (it was in the low 20's before)

The router is plugged into the master socket, all filters are working to my knowledge, so nothing to concern me within this property.

OK, so I have to wait 10 days for things to apparently settle down, but AIUI, if you start off with bad results, you continue with bad results, and can have a fight to get things resolved.

What a big disappointment.

Edited by tx2 (Thu 09-Nov-06 20:43:12)

I went from a stable 2Mb to a hellish Max connection.
It does take a while to get used to and a half decent router helps.

Now it's about as stable as it'll get and I'm happy.

As for the SNR - that's perfectly normal. The target SNR for MAX is 6dB and you'll see the SNR wavering between 0 and about 7-8 for a few days until the line finds it's level.
This is not an A&A thing, it's a Max thing.

You state that you had a 20dB margin on 2Mb, so what is your sync speed now??
I went from a 24dB 2Mb margin to around a 5000k sync on Max.

Also, are you using the A&A provided Zyxel? If so it's very good at syncing quite fast, but not very stable on lossy Max lines. I recently swapped the Zyxel for a Cisco 837 and found the router resyncs a lot less and it s LOT more stable.

If you get any issues, the guys in the IRC channel are always helpful and will help out wherever they can, and the A&A support guys are second to none.

the problem isnt a&a its with the ipstream product itself, if you went on 2meg fixed with a&a it would have been as stable as it was with nildram. The confusing logs you mention is more then the zero logs you get at nildram where you hope what they tell you is true.

If you went back to nildram now keeping your upto 8meg you would have the same stability problems.

well, i'm using a Draytek 2600, so I guess that is a good router? It's always served me well, but if i need to change, I will.

I certainly don't blame AAISP for the problem, I know it is a BT thing. I guess time will tell as to how they deal with it if the line proves to be troublesome on Max, which I would be very surprised at given how good it's been in the past on fixed speeds.

I've looked at using the Zyxel, but I don't think I have a problem with my line. My previous SNR and attenuation figures were close to the same for each, namely low 20's, which I understand was good?

Still., the line only went live on Wednesday, so I've got till next weekend to see if it sorts itself out.

Low 20's is not fantastic for 2Mb, that would mean you've got a good 40-50dB loss on your line (at a guess) which is not ideal for Max.

I mentioned the Zyxel as it makes the line problems look worse when they are not.

I recently moved to a Cisco and last night not only did I stay synced at the same speed, but my SNR margin dropped just 2dB. Normally I'd have expected to drop to about 2dB by about 6-7pm, it'll resync once or maybe twice in the night and settle with a little higher SNR - now I believe it's "found it's groove" so to speak and I'm hoping it'll stay like this.

You can follow it's progress on the mrtg link below.

Edited by deleted (Fri 10-Nov-06 09:13:53)

Have found this site, http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/maxdsl2.htm, which I think will prove quite useful :-)

Kitz was always the star - she should be given a medal by BT for services towards broadband.

Have you contacted [email protected]? Let us know what the response is like...

My Draytek 2600 is showing these readings:

Up Speed Down Speed SNR Margin Loop Att.
448000 7936000 8.5 23.5

Can anyone glean anything off this?

You're upstream is synced at 448kb/s.

Your downstream is synced at just under 8Mb/s.

Your SNR margin is 8.5dB.

Your attenuation is 23.5dB.

So... you're line is pretty good and you should be getting much more than 2Mb/s from downloads. If you haven't already, I really think you should contact support (bear in mind that they close at 5pm and won't reopen until Monday).