BT Total BB - 5 months of hell (HomeHub 3 Stats)

Hi, I moved house about 6 months ago and after a month my BT BB service was enabled. There were some initial problems with the stability which were traced to some suspect wiring inside the house but 2 different engineers on 2 different occasions supposedly fixed those issues.
I live in a pretty rural location although not too far from the nearest exchange and my line should support up to 5mbps although on the odd week the BB has behaved I have only seen around 3.8mbps - not a problem.
Over the last 5 months the broadband routinely drops out, then when it comes back on it is around 1.6mbps but after 12-24 hours it then settles at 300kbps. I have 4 engineers out who can find no problems inside the house and have also had a new HomeHub 3. The issue seems to be not so bad with the new router, although the speed now only clocks 2.6mbps and is very unstable - when playing on xbox live it disconnects me fairly frequently.

I thought I'd post the info from the router and see if it points anyone to what might be the issue. The 'Error Seconds' look pretty high to me but I have no idea what that figure actually means!!

All help greatly appreciated!

Line state: Connected
Connection time: 2 days, 23:49:45
Downstream: 5.313 Mbps
Upstream: 448 Kbps

VPI/VCI: 0/38
Type: PPPoA
Modulation: G.992.1 Annex A
Latency type: Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up): 9.5 dB / 21.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up): 36.9 dB / 22.0 dB
Output power (Down/Up): 19.6 dBm / 11.9 dBm
FEC Events (Down/Up): 1705639 / 250
CRC Events (Down/Up): 35730 / 166
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote): 0 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote): 0 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote): 0 / 0
HEC Events (Down/Up): 164713 / 138
Error Seconds (Local/Remote): 7211 / 156

What did the engineers do?

Line is supporting 5.3Meg, so they are meeting their promise, the estimates given are connection speed, not throughput promises.

The mode is saying it has been connected at 5.3Meg for almost three days. If XBox has been disconnecting in the last day or two then it is possible the problem is NOT ADSL related.

The error seconds show that an error was detected in 7211 seconds in the three day period, this errors were probably largely corrected, hence the FEC figure.

Based on your attenuation you are connecting at a slower than to be expected speed, so I would question whether the phone wiring has been resolved. Do you have a master socket, and if so, can you get the line stats when plugged into the internal test socket.

Your broadband connection has not dropped for 3 full days!

If these disconnections have been happening in the last 3 days - IT'S NOT THE BROADBAND! This hasn't gone off once.

However for the line attentuaton your speed should be ALOT better. This suggests your setup internally is incorrect.

If your setup is incorrect, the ONLY effect it's having is causing the router to sync at 5 meg, instead of a few meg higher. It's not causing the broadband to drop...

Based on the statistics your line is completely stable and is not dropping.

Also your sync is what BT have promised. 5 meg. As already stated, this is a connection speed. Expect to see around 60 - 80% of the connection speed. So around 3 - 5 meg is ok.

I think we need a few photos of your phone sockets and the wiring. So we can see how old the setup is. However the disconnections don't seem related to your broadband or setup.

EDIT: sorry to repeat what you've already said MrSaffron. Started my reply a while back & then had to pause in the middle.

Are you using wireless?

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 04-Apr-11 18:26:30)

Thanks for the feedback both! Just to elaborate slightly:
- You are correct, I can see it hasn't dropped out in 3 days but I think the xbox problem might be an illustration that the speed drops too low to keep a connection to the servers?

- I have tried the router into the master socket and results do not vary

- The wiring in the house is Cat5

- BT engineers have done the following:
1st engineer - Disconnected 8 of the 11 sockets which were running off the master socket!! (no, I don't live in a mansion it's a tiny 3 bed semi but the guy who wired it obviously hadn't heard of wireless handsets!)
2nd engineer - Disconnected 1 more socket as he found a fault with what the other engineer had left
3rd engineer - Performed line test back to exchange, checked all internal wiring and micro filters and found no problems
4th engineer - Checked all internal wiring, micro filters & router & found no problems
5th engineer - Performed line test back to exchange, checked the router and internal wiring and replaced the router

- I am using wireless but ethernet offers no improvement

I now have a 'boost' engineer book for a visit on Thursday so am hoping that it might get resolved once and for all.

Thanks again for the advice,
Ed

I am thinking that the following has occurred however I COULD be wrong.... (I probably am)

Basically the master goes straight out of your household avoiding internal wiring. So nothing inside the property SHOULD interfere.

Additional phone sockets generally go past plug sockets, light cabling, pipe work (hot and cold) etc. The wiring to the master is generally very well shielded, however internal wiring is not.

This can mean that the line is perfectly stable for 10 days. Then suddenly you plug for instance an hoover into the socket which the wiring passes. This causes the router to drop sync from 5 meg to 0.3 meg - for example.

A desk lamp, electric heater or a mobile phone charger etc. may have no effect. It's completely random what's going to interfere. On the flip side, a mobile phone charger may create issues whereas the hoover might not...

The BT profile system works in a funny way.

Let�s work on the assumption of the hoover causing the issues. The hoover is plugged in a socket. The additional telephone sockets wiring passes this plug socket.

The hoover causes the sync to fall from 5 Meg to 0.3 Meg.

Later on you notice the speed is slow, and reboot the router. The router resyncs at 5 meg.

HOWEVER, by now the BT profile is set to 0.3 meg. Until the router remains connected for a FULL 4 days, you won�t see above 0.3 meg. After 4 days of constant connection the profile will reset to around 5 meg...

In a worst case scenario internal wiring may cause the noise margin to flap on a regular basis. This causes the noise margin target to be increased. If this occurs you can be waiting 14 days or longer for the speeds to increase.

USING THE MASTER

People who use additional sockets for the broadband regularly experience issues such as slow speeds etc.

They think, let�s try the master... They do a speed test and it's still slow. They think - It must not be the extension socket.

WRONG... By the time they use the master the BT profile has already been reduced. They need to leave the router in the master for 4 - 5 days to see the profile change. At this point it becomes clear that the extension was the issue all along. And guess what, their speeds never slow down again.

Right so; I'm going to ask you to do 3 things for me...

Can you take a photograph of the master socket? I have a feeling it's not going to be an NTE5 socket. If it is we can access the test socket. If not, shame

Can you run a speed test at http://www.speedtester.bt.com/ and copy and paste the results. This lets us see whether the BT profile has been affected.

Can you plug the Home hub into the master socket and copy and paste your statistics once again?


This lets us see how much the extensions affecting the line. E.g. if the noise margin changes, sync, attenuation etc.

ALSO I personally think the disconnections and the speed issues are two different things. Possibly a faulty xbox wifi adaptor or bad wifi channel

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 04-Apr-11 20:42:51)

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tools/bt-master-socket... - pictures of the various normal BT sockets

A useful trick to improve connection speeds.
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/faq/sections/radsl.htm...

It is also totally feasible that the problems are just a busy BT network, I would suggest when using the XBox to leave a ping running on a PC (that is NOT using wireless), and if the XBox is using wireless to switch to Ethernet, and see if packets are being dropped out.

To run a ping continously
ping -t www.thinkbroadband.com

"After 4 days of constant connection the profile will reset to around 5 meg... " minor correction, big jumps in IP Profile should be faster, i.e. between 1 hour and 5 days. Also disconnects are allowed, it is the connection speed after each reconnect that matters.

I learn something new everytime I post on the good old forums

Pings and dropped packets had completely slipped my mind. We had massive issues with VirginMedia where the line didn't disconnect but the packet loss was so high we couldn't access websites. So it felt like a disconnection.

So many possibilities...

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 04-Apr-11 22:00:33)

Thanks for this and I think you may be spot on. The master is pretty new as the 1st engineer changed it to the new Openreach one. All the cat5 cables run into some trunking with also carries electric and coax for the TVs which are boosted - I dread to think how much potential there is for interference. That said, isn't cat5 shielded?

I think I am going to try and plug the router into the master for 4-5 days and see what happens. I will run the speed test when I get home, before I plug into the master and paste the results.

The good news is that we will be starting an extension soon on the house so I might be able to re-route the cat5 cables to minimise the chance of interference.

If the master is a normal NTE5A where the bottom half of the faceplate can be (carefully) removed, as in this pic then you need to connect the filter directly to the test socket on the wall at the back and take the stats asap afterwards. Don't use a plug-in phone extension cable, just filter >> ADSL cable >> router.

None of the extension sockets will (should!) work, so you may not want to leave it for long like that, but if after taking the stats you plug a DECT base station into the filter that would be OK. Or if it isn't OK, then there's your/a problem!

Just trying using the master external socket doesn't really help.

Can you run a speedtest at http://www.speedtester.bt.com/

This really would help us to see if your BT profile has actually been limited

Also like already advised statistics in the Test socket would be brilliant. If you don't have this kind of master. Get us stats in the master.

Cheers buddy!