FTTC on a currently poor line

HI guys (and ladies),

I've just ordered Infinity 2 last night to get rid of my currently poor ADSL line. The current line is at least a mile long - Sam Knows puts the direct distance as 1.5km but the FTTC cabinet is a lot closer - 350-400 yards as it is near the entrance of the estate.

The line is quite poor for ADSL, even from the test socket. I've tried quiet line tests from the test socket with a wired analogue handset and I can't hear and noise or crackling.

Last night when I placed the order I was synced at a mighty 406kbs downstream
DMT Snapshot 406kbs
Normally I get between 1-1.5Mb but normally if it sync higher the packet loss and errors are horrendous.
Interestingly after tweaking in DMT I got it synced at 2.8Meg and it seemed stable.

DMT-2.8Mb Screenshot

The BT Wholesale checker gives the following:

For Telephone Number 0191385xxxx on Exchange FENCEHOUSES

Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line speed up to 1Mbps. However due to the length of your line the 1Mbps service may require an engineer visit who will, where possible, supply the broadband service.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL Max broadband line speed of 2Mbps; typically the line speed would range between 1.5Mbps and 4.5Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports an estimated ADSL2+ broadband line speed of 3Mbps; typically the line speed would range between 1.5Mbps and 5.5Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a fibre technology with an estimated WBC FTTC Broadband where consumers have received downstream line speed of 57.4Mbps and upstream line speed of 20Mbps.

The actual stable line speed supportable will be determined during the first 10 days of use. This speed may change over time, to ensure line stability is maintained.

The PCP spreadsheet gives a uplift figure of 8.69 which doesn't seem to match with the BT estimates.

My query is whether to try and book out a voice fault to get them to check the line and risk the engineer charge or should I jiust wait and hope the poor part of the line somewhere exsting route between the current cabinet and the exchange?

Sorry for the length of the post but I thought it would be best to put as much info as possible.

Just wait until the technician arrives to install Infinity.

He will be remaking connections in the cabinet, so any there which are dodgy could get renewed.

There is a chance that the poor sync is due to high levels of noise in the ADSL band and is being picked up before the cabinet ...

Ignore the uplift figure - it is an estimate and average for all of the lines on the cabinet and is only used for internal BT purposes.

I thought that would be the case.

Thanks for the help

Your current ADSL line is well over 3km to the exchange with that attenuation, or its an aluminium line. It will be a massive improvement on FTTC.

Thanks James. Hope you have a good long weekend

I never stop working so it won't be much different this weekend

"He will be remaking connections in the cabinet, so any there which are dodgy could get renewed. "

not could but will as you have to remake the connections in the cab as part of the FTTC job.

and you are right just let the CSE who rolls up do his job

Edited by deleted (Fri 01-Jun-12 23:48:36)

I had a long standing 2 year ( 9 months with Be* ) HR fault on my line causing havoc with my ADSL and Be* would not send an engineer out to it, after FTTC was installed the fault was fixed due to re making the connections in the CAB and my service has been flawless ever since..

BTW, i was not guessing i had a HR fault i could see it on a TDR tester from work and it was gone after FTTC install..

the uplift is based on VDSL against standard ADSL so standard ADSL so it was 3 and uplift was 8 time that would give you 24 meg out of 40 -- rember spreadsheet is before 80./20 launch so 24 out is 40 is sort of consistent with 57 out of 80 - no not worth it

Before they only offered the 80/20 service on the unlimited the BT checker stated 40/10 for infinity 1 and 57/20 for infinity 2.

The line is circa 10 years old, when the estate was built. I don't know if they were using copper, aluminium or zinc cabling then. As the exchange is a lot older then the cabling from our estate could join onto some old existing cabling in a cabinet.

Just need to decide whether ton try the home hub or go for something like the Asus Rt-n56u which supports 5Ghz and more aerials + channels concurrently.

Have no fear, your distances are exactly the same as mine. I was getting between 3-4mb on ADSL.

Since swapping to Infinity Option 2 last week my speeds are now at a steady 70mb Download and 18mb Upload. speedtest.net shows my speed as 39mbps but I download via direct link sites at 8.8MBps. If you know you MegaBytes from your Megabits then you would know to the the calculation of 8.8MB x 8 = 70.4mbps.

This is due to the fact that there are 8 'bits' in a 'Byte' and what we care about is the Bytes, ISP's like to show off with 'bits'.

MB = MegaByte
mb = Megabit.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

This is due to the fact that there are 8 'bits' in a 'Byte' and what we care about is the Bytes, ISP's like to show off with 'bits'.

MB = MegaByte
mb = Megabit.

WRONG

MB = MegaByte
Mb = Megabit

mb = millibit

Just a quick note. Our Infinity install was completed today. Initial test was around the 60Mb mark but it seems to have settled to around 45-50Mb. Certainly an improvement on the 0,25Mb we'd been suffering on ADSL.

The Openreach said there were no issues on the line so the issues must have been on the line between the cabinet and the Fencehouses exchange.