Speed reduced for no reason of mine. Not returning

I have been following the thread started by hope101 and I have a similar problem. My speed has suddenly reduced after many months at a stable speed. Unfortunately I am not very well versed in the technical issues of line speeds so am asking for help here.

I live in a very small village, about 2km from the telephone exchange, so I do not expect to receive the 8 Mbps that I am paying for. Nevertheless I was consistently receiving 3.6 Mbps over many, many months and no changes have been made to the set up within the house. I have used the same Home Hub for over 3 years.

At the beginning of July, the speed suddenly reduced to 1.6 Mbps and stayed there for about 3 weeks. At that time there were several BT Openreach vans working in the village over a period of about 2 weeks. So something was being changed. I have read about the issues of noise on lines and waited to see if my speeds would return. Eventually the speed crept back to about 2.7 to 2.8 Mbps then stuck there. But I want my earlier speed back.

This morning I called BT. Reached India obviously, and a technician who insisted on asking all the usual questions, as though I was a new user. I have been with BT for years and know how to check microsfilters and I reset my router every night. It is also quite clear to me that the work in the village has disrupted my speed and I only want someone to get in touch with my exchange and ask them to change the noise levels. This technician insisted I carry out a BT speed test www.speedtester.bt.com . despite me having loads of tests from Think Broadband. My Vista system with Explorer 8 tells me I do not have Java Applets, so it will not carry out the test. I also have Firefox installed. Firefox tells me BT requires an older version of Java than I have installed. It loads the BT page, but results in an error. The technician also couldn�t carry out the test. He told me I would have to wait 3 hours to repeat the test.

I tried to ask the technician if he would be able to help me further or could he now do nothing if I had to wait 3 hours and just could not get a yes or no answer from him. He kept talking from his script whilst all I wanted to know was whether I had to hang up or not, only needing a yes or no answer. In the end I got so frustrated I swore at him and hung up.

I also have Safari browser installed, so 3 hours later tried again. Error again. Can someone help me? If I phone BT again I will have the same trouble. I only want to get in touch with my local exchange. Is there a local number I can call, or anything else I can do?

The technician told me that maybe new users were using the same connection and that would have made my speeds go down. What!!! I live in a tiny village. I pay for Option 3, 8 Mbps. Regardless of the number of other people. I want my old speed back. Maybe I just have to migrate.

Which exchange?

Rothbury, Northumberland

Well at least it seems from here that it isn't WBC causing it.The checker for VP congestion at your exchange is green, but hasn't been updated for anywhere since June that I have seen.

Let's see if anyone else has ideas.

Line stats?

Agreed line connection, attenuation and noise margin are needed

Probably line flapped during the work and target noise margin has gone up in response, slowing you down but making things more stable

I have recently had a problem on my line that caused a large number of re-syncs. I see my SN Margin Down has increased to 10.4 from 4.9dB. My Sync speed has reduced by quite a bit.

Is there anyway to get the SN Margin lowered or should this reduce automatically?

Thanks,
Sean

I don�t know how I can get my line stats. I have tried to use the BT speedtester with 3 different browsers, Explorer, Firefox and Safari and receive error messages each time. I have tried with a Vista computer and one running XP. I am also unable to log in to my hub advanced settings. I have tried user admin with password admin, also using admin with the hub network key as my password.

Where else can I obtain my stats?

His question is a link to a site that's tells you how to get your stats .

When was the last time you re-sync'ed?

If you haven't done so since the problem, then do so while it is still long before dusk. If you don't manage that then do it well after dawn tomorrow.

Then read the stats immediately and please post connection speed, attenuation and margin. So we can form an opinion.

It could just be a hangover from when this happened, or it could be the target margin has been raised. If it is the target margin then you need 10-14 days as stable as possible, (I prefer no re-sync's at all but a few seem not to be critical). If the error figures are reasonable then the system will drop it by 3dB and re-sync you automatically.

If that happens at night then the speed may still be not good, so then re-sync in daylight as above. And repeat the exercise if the margin is still well above 6dB.