In reply to a post by RobertoS:

You now have an easy birthday/Christmas present option. Buy him a phone for the lounge!

OK, you had that before, but the place might have looked cluttered with the router there as well.

He seemed happy enough with the router in the lounge, but it was actually a necessity, because the Sky older boxes needed an ethernet connection to download catchup content. I imagine they will operate with wifi now. I've cleared away various items now and it looks much less cluttered.

LOL
In which case for the original Sky setup an Ethernet cable from the hall to the lounge instead of the one that was put in would have been fine. 100 metre maximum length. But that�s history .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

LOL
In which case for the original Sky setup an Ethernet cable from the hall to the lounge instead of the one that was put in would have been fine. 100 metre maximum length. But that�s history .

I have an Ethernet cable that stretches across the perimeter of our lounge, going around the door frame and it's not the tidiest looking solution, but certainly effective. At the moment he has neither phone nor broadband, so either it's in progress or Vodafone have made a right mess up.

As a quick followup to all of this, my father is now live with Vodafone. It should have gone live yesterday, but for whatever reason it didn't happen and the internet light was still fluctuating green, rather than solid.

This morning over the phone I had him switch off the router for about 30 seconds, then restart it and do the same with his computer. A few minutes later a browser window popped up, asking him to set his content filter settings and he was able to get started.

The data rate inside the router was pretty much maximum, but his noise levels on the line are quite high and double what I have, however it is working and no dropouts during the day that I know of. Wifi working well across the different rooms.

Tomorrow I'll drive over to check it all and see it for myself. Many thanks for all your help here.

Edited by charlestown (Wed 04-Apr-18 21:17:00)

Hopefully it will be OK in terms of stability and speed and in the longer term you may not have to consider the expense of fitting a master NTE5, etc. etc. One problem you may face though is that there is apparently no easy means of isolating the house wiring together with access to a test socket

Good luck.

Edited by 4M2 (Wed 04-Apr-18 22:21:24)

He's not obsessed by speed, so if it's a couple mbps less than perfect I'm sure he won't mind. The key point is whether it remains stable with that faceplate and obviously how Vodafone performs in general. I'll have a better idea of the situation tomorrow when I visit again.

He did mention that web pages were opening quicker now and we did a screen share via Apple's built in sharing facility that was notably better. There was no lag at all, whereas it could be really frustrating before now when he had Sky ADSL. If push comes to shove and we end up calling in Open Reach it will still be a big saving on what he was paying with Sky between the broadband and TV.

The data rate inside the router was pretty much maximum, but his noise levels on the line are quite high and double what I have,

I seem top recall you saying his line was very short to the cabinet, if so the SNR may be high as he has full sync already and so there's 'nothing else' to be done with the spare SNR .... as seen with my line .......

Data rate:
20.00 Mbps / 80.00 Mbps
Maximum data rate:
31708 / 105621
Noise margin:
15.2 dB / 12.3 dB
Line attenuation:
9.1 dB

The cabinet is literally opposite his house on the corner of the street, so it couldn't really get much closer. I checked his speeds earlier and he's achieving pretty much maximum speeds over wifi, so there probably wouldn't be much gain from fitting a new faceplate, unless we find the line becomes unstable.

We managed to add my name to his account and for some strange reason this gave him a discount on his calls plus free caller ID. As a result he'll be paying just £27 a month for 38mbps broadband with unlimited anytime calls to mobile or landline including line rental. That's a pretty good deal by any measure.

Just to make my life easier he's order an Amazon TV stick, so I'll be back there again tomorrow...

All sounds great . As Zarjaz says, there's every reason his noise margin will be high at the moment, given the closeness of the cabinet and the fact he is only on a 40/10 Openreach connection. (The 38Mbps is just a ruling by Ofcom that at least 10% of the ISP's customers have to get the advertised connection speed for the product).

Tonight is when DLM will make any major adjustment if it thinks it necessary. The second night after initial connection as long as it has been connected for at least 15 minutes the first day. Though if there were really serious problems it can jump in earlier.

I'll have to go back either tomorrow or over the weekend to sort out his Amazon stick for the TV, so I'll be sure to check the speeds again. I don't think there has been any downtime, so I'd be surprised if the speed suffers significantly. On the Vodafone forums I see several complaints about slowdowns during peak hours, but it's been pretty good for me and decidedly better than I experienced with CloudScape.