Biggest loss with V6 firmware was the MDC, that had some great tools. Hopefully there's still something in there that someone just needs to stumble across but with the auto updates that the firmware allows, any discoveries may quickly disappear.

Quest firmware is useful on the newest V6 firmware models - its a bit quicker to react when navigating the routers setup pages and fully unlocked.

Its a shame they'll never release a generic firmware though - I can understand the policy since their customers are ISP's not you or me and therefore can't be seen to be circumventing their ISP's policies.

But yeah it is a top piece of kit and I always end up coming back to it after having a play with whatever else I've gotten my hands on... so glad I got a V5 and immediately changed to singtel firmware - little change singtel are ever going to try and update the firmware since the seem to have completely discontinued the router in their lineup.

How does the new BT 2701HGV-C compare?

Edited by FRS_Plunderer (Sat 04-Jun-11 14:24:31)

Thanks everyone. I will see if I can get hold of a 2wire.

One other point I wanted to ask about: I always understood that noise levels are higher in the evening/night. However, monitoring the SNR margin on my modem using RouterStats over the last few days seems to show that the Noise margin is slightly higher during the night than the day. There is not a lot of variation as the range is only from 3.5 to 5 dB but it's definitely higher at night. Any ideas?

So just to be clear - your router is reporting a downstream SNR margin of 3.5db during the day and 5db at night?

Yes. I was thinking it could mean that there is some other kind of noise which is swamping the normal day/night noise cycle.

I've been round the house checking appliances, connections, etc. but haven't spotted anything noticeable except for the phone. if I unplug the phone, the SNR margin drops by 2 dB - plug it back in, back up goes the SNR margin by the same 2 dB amount. I think this is because the phone is plugged into a wall extension at the end of the daisy chain on the extension cabling in the house and maybe when it's not terminated it's acting like an antenna?

Its a first to me but if you have a long extension run it may be preventing some signal reflection at the end of it - mabey like the chain terminators that were put on data cables and ribbons.

From the sounds if it a bit of an internal rewire might be an idea for you.

In reply to a post by Frank873:

Yes. I was thinking it could mean that there is some other kind of noise which is swamping the normal day/night noise cycle.

I've been round the house checking appliances, connections, etc. but haven't spotted anything noticeable except for the phone. if I unplug the phone, the SNR margin drops by 2 dB - plug it back in, back up goes the SNR margin by the same 2 dB amount. I think this is because the phone is plugged into a wall extension at the end of the daisy chain on the extension cabling in the house and maybe when it's not terminated it's acting like an antenna?

The margin falls when you unplug the phone? It should do very little, but if anything it should rise.

What happens if you also unplug the phone power supply from the mains?

Yes it fell by 2 dB. I have just repeated the exercise and it is behaving slightly differently. Dropped by 0.5 dB only when I unplugged the phone but didn't bother going back to its original value when I plugged it back in again. My 585v8 only reports the noise in 0.5 dB steps which doesn't help.

Unplugging the phone power supply made no difference when I tried it - with and without the phone being plugged also. It looks like something has changed somewhere - the effect was reproducible when I first reported it. There's something funny going on but likely to be very specific to my house, equipment and wiring and possibly time of day. I'll need to do some more thorough testing.

Sky box been replaced? Filter on it checked anyway?

Sky box is not connected.

I acquired a 2Wire 2700-HGV as recommended which is synching at 1600 to 1632 kbps and appears to be rock-solid at 6 dB noise. I'm not seeing any of the noise variations I used to see previously including that effect from unplugging the phone connection.

I may consider re-siting the modem to the master socket to see if I can make it up to the next BRAs profile band.

Many thanks to everyone for their help.