What can be done? - Slow Fibre

Hello,
I was on Sky ADSL getting 3.5mb down 768k up. I had my Sky fibre installed 2 weeks ago with an estimated speed of 25MB down 7mb up.

Once is was initially connected the engineer was surprised that the speed was only 14mb down. He left but I decided to phone Sky the next day as the router hadn't shifted and I knew it should connect at the max rate initially and slow down from there, after a LOT of hassle (including being told my fibre hadn't been installed then that I needed a new Sky hub - a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes on the phone) Sky said there was a problem and arranged an engineer visit for the next day.

The engineer came and said the line was about 1.1km long where he would of estimated that it was 800m but found it went to the bottom of our road then back up. He had a look up a the pole and messed about around the place and cabinet. He said the phone line seemed fine but there was a lot of noise. When he left I was on 18mb down which I was happy with as thinkbroadband estimate 17-24mb for my distance so coming from 3.5mb I was happy enough with this.

Then the real trouble started, I experienced about 15-20 disconnections over 4-5 days with the speed going lower and lower until it got to 12mb . I phoned Sky and after another lengthy hold spoke to someone who seemed to know what he was doing who said there was definately a problem and as there was over a 25% reducion in speed it would flag as a fault anyway. He told me he was escalating my problem with BT who would look at my line stats carefully, get back to Sky within 3 days and they would contact me to let me know what needed to be done. Fair enough.

The nex (monday) morning I had an engineer turn up at 7:40am with no real idea why he was there other than there was a problem with the fibre. I had to go to work so left him to it although again he told me there was noise but it shouldnt be disconnecting. After getting back home I found the net was on 13mb down. I have given it several days and it has disconnected at least 3 times now on 10mb down (10,000 exactly in router stats) 5.6mb up, it did go to 12 then 11 and then a couple of upload changes whilst the download stuck at 10mb. These disconnects (Previously had 4 between 8pm-10pm and all over) seem to happen about 4am however so not sure if some of these were remote ones but no call from Sky so looks i'm going to be on hold again on the 27th.

General question of what can I expect? Will I eventually just get 'Your line is too naff so take what I can get or cancel', will another random engineer visit actually do anything. Obviously going by the estimated speed and speed over distance guides my line is not fitting correctly as if there is something wrong but do BT actually have this so called department that looks at and monitors line stats? I know my dream of them simply running a new line is impossible due to cost. Does anyone have any experience on what I can hope for?

Any advice appreciated.

Edited by Richeh (Mon 24-Dec-12 23:11:10)

It's not really a question of what can be done ,but a case of what Openreach & sky are prepared to do, if fixing the line properly to give you +24mbit speeds would cost openreach mega money then nothing much would be the answer unless funded from sky or yourself ,
Now if DLM could be disabled, you would get a higher speed, but it probably wouldn't stop the disconnects,unless the reason for the disconnects is DLM changing the profile,due to error rates reaching the threshold required, they should know if this is the case or not

If they end up saying that nothing more can be done, i would be doing my best to revert back to adsl and be released from the remainder of the contract penalty free
Then if you still wanted fttc, wait until vectoring is implemented or if you can afford it fibre on demand,
Don't forget the aggregation node may not be as far away from your home as the FTTC cab is,so always worth getting a quote, that's what i would do, but it's your call at the end of the day,should it end up worst case senario

Edited by tommy45 (Tue 25-Dec-12 01:34:07)

Fibre on Demand is FTTP so distance not relevant except probably for the installation cost.

worth mentioning vectoring doesnt add bandwidth from nowhere, it recovers bandwidth lost to crosstalk. So it wont make a long line work like a short line but since its logical that everyone would be affected to crosstalk to some degree (unless the only customer on the cabinet) it should yield at least some boost. Its a long wait tho as I think openreach will do profile 30a first (as thats free), business's like BT wont roll out vectoring as a charity to just help people, they will do it when its the most economical option to push advertised speeds so probably after 30a has been exhausted.

To give an idea of the affect of vectoring, its predicted without it maybe 50% of lines at 100m or less can get 100mbit, with it 100% of lines at 400m can do 100mbit.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Fibre on Demand is FTTP so distance not relevant except probably for the installation cost.

was why i said about the aggregation node possibly being closer than the fttc cab,and his line would be free of BT openreach's DLM ect

So vectoring isn't that good then? As for them charging for it,Whilst it wouldn't come as any great suprise from such a company as BTopenreach, I would find it an insult if they did this,
Afte all if customers connections are goofed due to crosstalk,that would be down to the copper dside line plant not being a suitable medium for mutiple Vdsl connections They should of therefore rolled out FTTH and not FTTC Vectoring should be free of charge ,
Or customers of FTTC should be given a 30day cooling off period , So if they encounter issues due to crosstalk where their sync drops by a significant ammount
Or they make available the option to disable DLM , As just doing that would be sufficient for some

What are you using to measure your speed ?

I cant get anything above 50-60Mb/s using speedtest.net, sometimes as low as 40mb.

However i know from my download manager I can get 9.6MB/s (77Mb/s) 24/7

This is confirmed with a multithreaded speed tester like JD's Auto speedtester.

The only speedtest site that even remotely matches my true speed is this Fibre speed checker from BTW http://www.speedtester.bt.com/beta/speedtest-remote.jsp

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Afte all if customers connections are goofed due to crosstalk,that would be down to the copper dside line plant not being a suitable medium for mutiple Vdsl connections They should of therefore rolled out FTTH and not FTTC Vectoring should be free of charge

Why?

Or customers of FTTC should be given a 30day cooling off period , So if they encounter issues due to crosstalk where their sync drops by a significant ammount

Why?

Or they make available the option to disable DLM , As just doing that would be sufficient for some

And screw others. Thanks pal.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Afte all if customers connections are goofed due to crosstalk,that would be down to the copper dside line plant not being a suitable medium for mutiple Vdsl connections They should of therefore rolled out FTTH and not FTTC Vectoring should be free of charge

Why?

Or customers of FTTC should be given a 30day cooling off period , So if they encounter issues due to crosstalk where their sync drops by a significant ammount

Why?

Or they make available the option to disable DLM , As just doing that would be sufficient for some

And screw others. Thanks pal.

Why do you think ? So the customer doesnt get screwed by BT including yourself, that's why, And disabling DLM wouldn't screw up other connections, If it did then that would only highlight that the rollout of FTTC was the wrong way to do things, It may even force their hand into updgrading affected d'sides in some way to eliminate crosstalk,sooner rather than later , so if the whole FTTC went breasts up they would have no choice

Vectoring should be free because BT are in part responsible for it being such an issue , because they are failing to provide infrastucture of a quality fit for purpose

And without doubt everytime that they increase the speed next i belive will be 160mbps the more will see the effects of crosstalk

Edited by tommy45 (Tue 25-Dec-12 15:55:58)

I think Baldeagle will be best placed to give advice, I think his line length is similar to yours and he had speed problems not long after installation, think it took him the best part of a year to get it resolved. It only takes a few bad joints to bring the speed down.