Hi,
I'm one of those Broadband users who can just get Broadband, living in a village about 8kms from the phone exchange. I'm on SMSU whish is Shenley Church End in Milton Keynes but live in a village outside the city.
I'd never been able to sync at anything higher than about 1120kbps which has always put me on a 750K IP profile. Then, around New Year my sync went up to 1184kbps for some reason and stayed there for about a week. My IP profile jumped to 1000K and for the first time I was actually able to watch iPlayer with little drop out and our surfing experience was noticeably quicker! Then, suddenly our sync dropped back to around 1024kbps and so we went back to the 750K IP profile.
After seeing that our line could support a stable connection for over a week at 1182kbps I decided to raise a call with BT support and ask whether there was anything they could do. We went through the usual checks of connecting to the Test Socket which at that time made no difference and so they passed me to 2nd line support who called me the following morning and asked me to again plug into the Test Socket. I got the impression they were doing 'something' at their end but wasn't sure what they could do as I assumed that they were in India (it was an Indian technician I spoke to). Anyway, to my surprise I sync'd at something like 1350kbps - approx 350kbps faster than I've been used to. The technician told me that my line should be able to support this sort of speed and that there is obviously be something wrong with the wiring in my house because the connection syncd using the Test Socker. That was all he could do and that was the end of the call.
Obvoiusly I couldn't leave the HomeHub connected to the master socket so I put it all back together and of course syncd back at something like 1024kbps. I decided to disconnect the phone extensions on the BT face-plate (the bit we're allowed to touch) so that there was nothing interfering and substituted a new ADSL filter to connect both the phone and HomeHub to the face plate which now has nothing connected to it. The face plate simply plugs into the master socket so the ADSL connection is as close to the master socket as possible and yet I still can't sync about 1088kbps at best.
I can't see what else could be causing the signal to degrade other than having a faulty NTE5 face plate? I have one of the newer BT Openreach type with the built in bell filter and it's only 3 years old, surely it couldn't be faulty and yet something in there is causing my signal to drop so much.
Today, if I plug the router into the Test Socket it syncs at 1152kbps - *just* high enough to force a 1000K IP profile if it stayed stable for 3 days but when I was called by BT Support last month and they asked me to plug into the master socket I was seeing 1350ish kbps which was great. If any BT_care members are reading this, do you know if there is anything that can be done to raise my IP profile higher? I've ordered a new ADSL splitter face plate which, if it works, I hope should give me the same signal strength as if I was plagged direct into the Test Socket. If this is the case and my IP Profile could be raised (perhaps BT support did this when they called me? It is a coincidence otherwise that my sync speed jumped so high) then I may be able to get a 1350ish kbps sync speed all the time instead of languishing around 1024kbps. That extra speed makes a huge difference when your connection is so slow!
Apologies for the long post - I hope it makes sense? Hopefully you can all help?
Thanks guys,
Andrew