IP Profile & BT Master Socket - Help BT_Care!!

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

http://www.adslnation.com/phpapps/catalog/product_in... £9.18 + postage a new faceplate

Also without knowing your attenuation and noise margin figures to go with the sync it is hard to say if the charges are down to fiddling with the target margin, rather than a socketry issue

Hi, thanks for helping. I don't recall the SNR and Attenuation readings when I syncd at 1350kbps but my current readings are as follows:

Connection information
Line state Connected
Connection time 1 day, 1:08:20
Downstream 1,056 Kbps
Upstream 448 Kbps
ADSL settings
VPI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation ITU-T G.992.1
Latency type Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up) 6.6 dB / 7.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 63.5 dB / 31.5 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 14.6 dBm / 12.4 dBm

The best SNR I usually see is around 7.0 but normally it sits around 6.0.


Many thanks
Andrew

Which homehub?

I've found the v2 to be better than the v1 for sync speed.

I'll make my standard suggestion for a long line router...

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?rt=nc&_nkw=2wire%202700
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?_nkw=bt+business+hub

Edited by shtu (Thu 03-Feb-11 21:13:52)

IP Profile follows connection speed. It doesn't determine it. See this description.

Also as long as the line is generally stable, you will normally connect fastest by doing so well within full daylight hours.

Hi, I think it's the v2 model - black and curved. How would I tell for definite?

Sorry, I think my post was probably a bit confusing, I understood that the ip profile was determined by the connection speed but what I couldn't understand was when the bt support engineer called me (on my mobile phone) and asked me to plug into the test socket, my syc speed jumped from the usual 1024kbps to something like 1350kbps. If this had stayed for 3ish days I would have expected the ip profile to go up to 1000k but because I didn't want to leave the master socket dismantled, when I put it back together and plugged into the front plate my sync of course went back to 1024. If I connect to the test socket now I can only get 1152kbps at best so that's why I thought the engineer may have done something at his end, perhaps raising the target SNR?

I will try reconnecting at the test socket on Saturday, well into daylight hours because it's always dark before and after work.

Thanks for the advice. Regards,
Andrew

Let us know how the Saturday sync goes . Good luck.

(Just a further thought - you don't use a plug-in phone extension cable do you?)

Does it look like this,

http://www.gadgetspeak.com/aimg/565737-bt-home-hub-2...

That's a v2.


What you'll find is that out at the fringes, everything has to be spot-on with your setup to eke out every last Kb, so,

Remove all extension wiring.

Disconnect Sky boxes, oil tank, gas tank or alarm diallers from the line. (Note, diallers are often hard-wired to the BT side of the wiring. Naughty.)

TEST that all the extensions are dead once you remove the front part of the NTE to get at the test socket.

Use a good quality phone cable, uncoiled and away from the mains adapters, and as short as possible (more to avoid people coiling it up tidily, the actual length makes little difference - how many Km of cable are there to the exchange? The difference between a 1m and 2m cable is, er, slight).

Reconnect at lunchtime.

A filtered faceplate is near-essential at your distance. The Openreach branded ones are not expensive, the Clarity brand one is the same but allows you to run ADSL-only extension cabling if you wish to.

I would buy a 2700 and try it too - they can make a surprising difference.

Thanks RobertoS I will definately post tomorrows specs. In answer to your question, I don't have an extension Phone cable plugged in...
Thanks
Andrew