Moved to BT ADSL - Experience so far not good

BT Broadband - Our Business ADSL experience so far.

Our business has had a stable (not BT Retail) ADSL connection since April 2006 using a Netgear DG834G V2 router connecting at the maximum ADSLMAX speed of 448/8128. Our ISP gave us a static IP address included in the price, ideal for remote managment of the router and the machines, and a small monthly allowance quite sufficient for the email, software updates and occassional file transfer that we carry out and all at a cost that would please the low volume user anywhere. We have had just one noticeable period of service outage in six and a half years, so why move?

Time came to renew our telephone contract with BT. BT offered us reduced telephone charges (two business lines) provided we took Broadband also. The bundle included monthly telephone minutes and would save a couple of hundred pounds a year, even allowing for the additional charges for a static IP address. It seemed a "no-brainer".

All the first hurdles were completed easily. The MAC code came by email within a few hours. A transfer date was arranged for Monday 1st October. The old line dropped out just after midnight and when I reconfigured the router it came back in on the new BT service with over 1Mbps upstream and over 9Mbps downstream, a significant speed improvement. The SNR was about 4dB, a little low for stability I thought, but it was stable, for just four days.

The daily router log showed a stable connection with only a couple of reconnects up to end of business on Thursday. The daily router report email on Friday morning showed that from 17:04 Thursday, the line had been reconnecting three to nine times an hour. One's immediate reaction is "That's part of the training process and it wil sort itself out in a few hours, but why can't they leave well enough alone!"

On Friday, staff found the internet unusable. I attempted to connect remotely to manage the router. Nothing. The ordered "static" IP address had changed.

I used the online chat Fault Reporting System and was told that the address was dynamic and that I needed to go into the control panel and order a static address (where I was told it was £5 a month extra). I pointed out I had ordered a Static address and did not expect to configure it myself. I was also told that the 10 day training period was unavoidable and that "slow and high speeds" were part of the process. [Strange, our previous supplier never had trouble adjusting Exchange parameters to keep a marginal line stable].

With the now static IP, when I did connect remotely to the router it showed that the upstream speed had dropped to around 828kbps and the downstream had increased to 11725kbps. The connection was unstable and unusable. The SNR had dropped to 1.4dB.

I had hoped the BT Algorithm would sort itself out within the 72 hours available to opening of business on Monday. It hadn't; the router continued to drop the connection and re login several times an hour and was still doing so Tuesday morning.

So this morning, I drove the 19 miles to the business with a newer ADSL2+ V4 DG834G Netgear with V5 software. The same device runs successfully at over 15Mbps on another customer's premises.

I substitued the new for the old router. The new one connected successfully at a speed of 804kbps upstream and at over 12Mbps downstream, even faster!. I thought we were there. We are not. From within the business, no web site is usable and the packet loss rate is ridiculous. (About one in four 32byte pings to the bbc website gets a response. Nameserver responses are so unreliable you are likely to get "hostname not found" errors). I now can't get any successful remote connection to the management port of the router.

With 12 years of ADSL experience under their belts I had not expected the business to be destroyed by BT. No email for three business days so far and no-one within BT who is able to do anything about it apparently.

At this rate we will quickly absorb any potential saving from the move. Sometimes you wish you had left well enough alone for relatively marginal savings of a couple of hundred quid.

Sounds like you have moved from ADSLMax to 21CN. A number of people have reported problems with this, at various ISPs.

Can't help with the problem, but do you have Webmail access to your email? That would get round that part of it for now.

> Sounds like you have moved from ADSLMax to 21CN.

Probably so given the variety of speeds being set up.

As an engineer it amazes be that a "tuning algorithm" that can presumably read the type of equipment at the remote end can be allowed to set an SNR of (now) less than 1dB and not recognise that a line resetting serveral times an hour is useless. Similar optimisation algoritmns have been around since ADSLMax came in; have they been destroying other people's service for all those years without someone senior in BT hearing about it?

We didn't want higher speed though a bit more upstream is always useful. The first four days were fine; how do we get back there to a stable 1M / 9M? (Rhetorical question to the forum)

Thanks, but with the packet loss rate, no web site will display at all.

No but as a business don't you have a plan to work elsewhere if your building loses power/burns down?

With the modems have you tried forcing ADSL only mode, or ADSL2+ only mode. Does disconnecting all other devices from the line and using the test socket make any difference?

Support should have got you to try this sort of thing, and eventually the DLM is likely to slow you down further until the modems stop producing errors. Usually needs 10 or more disconnects per hour.

Also have you tried pings to not actual websites as that is affected by other faults that BT may have, but rather the first visible external IP address in a trace route. if that is good then the ADSL line is fine, and issue is deeper in the BT networks perhaps.

Thanks Andrew.

The algorithm appears now to have sorted itself out after five days of no service, almost to the hour. The speed has dropped back to 912/10893 with a 3 - 3.5dB "noise margin" now showing on the Netgear and the router management port is available remotely and apparently reliably.

The business is an opticians premises so, no, we don't have the plans you describe.

I don't see how the tests you describe help since the line was clearly stable after the change over to BT until BT's algorithm decided to "optimise it" for a higher speed than the line could cope with. The ping test is only one symptom; Repeated failure to resolve a domain name or bring up any vestigate of the BBC web site was rather more indicative of problems I would have thought.

Having speeds which are "slow to fast" for 10 days is one thing. An algorithm that sets a level of "no useful service" for five days is frankly rubbish; and thats the polite version. I find it amazing that it still does that after all the years such "optimsation" has been in place.

What are the router stats?

Are you aware of the 10 day training period?

If the change was from ADSL to ADSL2+ then ADSL2+ pushes more data down the line and thus can show up flaws that otherwise would not have been visible.

As for the tests basic ADSL 101 really

As for no useful service for five days very very rare, hence why there are not milions of posts about it