Fibre Boradband Poor performance What to do next ?

The reason that I have included this post here (instead of with my service provider) is that I believe that the problem lies with BT Openreach. I don't know enough to know whether they are spinning me a line or whether it is indeed possible that I get no performance improvement with fibre and that my performance is much worse than that of my neighbours.

I�m looking for advice about how to proceed with our fibre broadband. We get poor speed (<2 Mbps) but our neighbours get relatively acceptable performance (12 Mbps+)

We moved into a semi-rural property in South East Wales just over a year ago. We�ve had a lot of problems with our phone and broadband over this past year and as a result have endured over 15 engineer visits in the past 12 months � our neighbours have had a similar number of visits. We are Talktalk customers, our neighbours are a mixture of Plusnet, Talktalk and BT customers.

The cabinet that serves our property is 1.5 km away by road but the line back to it is around 3.5km due to the circuitous route that it takes. The cabinet has been supports fibre. Until we �upgraded� to fibre we got between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbps which seems reasonable.

We upgraded to fibre broadband on 6 December 2012 and the speed we got was 5.0 Mbps. This reduced by 200-300kbps every day until it has settled at 1.8 Mbps. We�ve had three engineer visits, the first two of which were the �wrong kind of engineer�. The feedback from the final visit on 27 December (I didn�t get to speak to the engineer unfortunately) was that our line was simply not suitable for fibre broadband and that BT Openreach would not replace the line.

I don�t trust that engineer. Partly this is because I don�t understand how the line can be good enough for between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbps on Adsl2 and not get any better on fibre and partly because while the engineer was doing his investigations, he managed to wreck my neighbour�s telephone line and broadband connection completely. I feel that we are being fobbed off , that BT Openreach are simply sick of us and that the engineer is just covering for his own lack of knowledge and/or incompetence.

I also don�t understand how neighbours both sides of our property (one closer to the cabinet, the other further away) who must have 99% the same topology get perfectly acceptable broadband performance while we do not.

I could of course have the fibre equipment removed but every time we�ve had an engineer come to do something it�s taken at least four visits and a month to undo whatever has been done in the first place.

Do any of you with more experience of dealing with this kind of thing have any advice about how I might proceed � or maybe at least explain why our fibre performance is the same as our non-fibre performance and is so much worse than that of our neighbours.

It could be the original installer made a pig's ear of it. Longstanding Openreach engineers would have got it right first time, new recruits may have been rushed through training which didn't cover whatever is giving you grief, Kelly's and Quinn's subcontractors appear to have a few cowboys amongst them.

Having said that, I'm sure you will have had some pukka Openreach guys on this. So I'd have thought they would have cleaned up anything like that.

Just in case, do you know which is your master socket, and is the modem near it? What make of modem is it, Huawei or ECI? How many extensions have you got there, and what is connected to them?

Does the master socket now look like the picture on this page?

Please can you run a BT Performance Test, the left-hand Diagnostic option, and copy/paste the contents of the two results text boxes.

At 3.5km I would only ever expect speeds like you are seeing, and it may just be the lottery that your line has more repair joints in it than the neighbours. Or a few lines take a shorter route.

Tech explanation:

VDSL uses higher frequencies than ADSL2+, thus has a much shorter range, e.g. with 1.5km of wire you would only expect 15 Mbps. The lower ADSL frequencies give it longer range, but lower speeds for the majority.

Your situation is fairly rare, and hence why engineers may be less experienced and frankly am surprised that Openreach has not said it is either take service as it is, or leave going back to an ADSL service.

In reply to a post by The_Don_Wales:

or maybe at least explain why our fibre performance is the same as our non-fibre performance

Comparing fibre performance with non-fibre performance is like comparing apples with pears.

ADSL depends on the distance from the exchange, with a lower top performance and a greater overall reach.

VDSL2 in FTTC has a much higher top performance for those close, but degrades *much* faster than ADSL. Some documents glibly state that it degrades to ADSL-like performance after 2km. Unfortunately, practical experience seems to show that FTTC runs out anywhere between 1km and 2km, depending on the kind of metal in the line (aluminium is worse than copper), the diameter of the metal, the age, the number of joints, and the exposure to the elements.

Meanwhile, ADSL can reach over 5km, but from the exchange rather than the cabinet.

For someone who lives far from their cabinet, but where the cabinet is pretty close to the exchange, they could well find that FTTC is *slower* than ADSL.

The cabinet that serves our property is 1.5 km away by road but the line back to it is around 3.5km due to the circuitous route that it takes.

Are you sure? We've certainly had people report your kind of speeds for distances between 1.5km and 2km, but we've never had a report of anything that works *at all* at 3.5km.

and is so much worse than that of our neighbours.

We have come across cases where an individual's line *has* taken a circuitous route, while the neighbours has not - this usually happens when the copper is degrading, pair swaps have happened, capacity is reached etc. I'm not sure it is common, but it is possible.

In reply to a post by The_Don_Wales:

I�m looking for advice about how to proceed with our fibre broadband. We get poor speed (<2 Mbps) but our neighbours get relatively acceptable performance (12 Mbps+)

At this point, the usual advice would be to start arming yourself with more knowledge about the state of your line, and the statistics that come from the modem. This is hard enough when you have to learn about what the statistics mean, but made much harder when BT have locked access to the modem so you can't get to the statistics.

Take a look at this post I made on a recent thread. It has the same advice I'd start with here.

We upgraded to fibre broadband on 6 December 2012 and the speed we got was 5.0 Mbps. This reduced by 200-300kbps every day until it has settled at 1.8 Mbps.

That suggests that DLM has been intervening to gradually increase the interleaving & error protection, which has gradually robbed you of bandwidth to feed the protection.

That, in turn, suggests that you have a long line *and* are suffering from interference - the most common type being crosstalk from other FTTC customers. Have your neighbours seen their speed decrease since you connected? You could be interfering with their service too...

I feel that we are being fobbed off , that BT Openreach are simply sick of us and that the engineer is just covering for his own lack of knowledge and/or incompetence.

It is definitely hard work to get a fault FTTC line sorted out - it seems to be harder than plain ADSL, certainly.

However, the things that get in the way tend to be the Openreach systems & rules behind the scenes rather than the engineer who physically turns up, but only has a limited amount of time he is allowed to spend.

Unfortunately, you are right at the point where BT can indeed tell you that fibre isn't suitable. To get them to react differently requires you to do most of the running now...

I also don�t understand how neighbours both sides of our property (one closer to the cabinet, the other further away) who must have 99% the same topology get perfectly acceptable broadband performance while we do not.

The biggest issues occur with aging copper infrastructure, where some of the lines are not really suitable for fibre, and that is running at capacity. The usual solution to a dodgy line is to swap to a spare. But if there are no spares, then you get to keep whatever is left... and Openreach aren't especially keen on replacing the multi-pair cabling from cabinet out to the distribution point.

In reply to a post by The_Don_Wales:

I also don�t understand how neighbours both sides of our property (one closer to the cabinet, the other further away) who must have 99% the same topology get perfectly acceptable broadband performance while we do not.

I've always had much lower speeds than estimated, and my neighbour tells me he gets speed tests of around 55meg, where as I get around 40meg, and I'm only 450 meters from my cabinet. I attempted to get BT to sort my line out, they did visit and check the internal wiring, but he was not allowed to do anything else, not even try the other pair of wires that comes into my house.

Bald_Eagle who wrote the logging scripts fought with BT via Plus Net for nearly a year to get his line sorted, eventually restoring it to near his original speed. He had various poor connections, and a faulty filter over that time.

I suspect I have a poor connection on my line, but my speed is descent so I can't be bothered with the hassle any more.

One option for you may be FTTP on demand latter this year, but it's not going to be cheap.

Partly this is because I don�t understand how the line can be good enough for between 1.5 and 2.0 Mbps on Adsl2 and not get any better on fibre

The frequency plans BT are using are optimised for the target market of shorter sub-loops at high speed, it isn't optimal for your case with a long line.

VDSL2 Profile 17a has a 6dB lower power limit than 8b for example (and both are lower than ADSL), and the ANFP imposes power masks based on line length which may curtail the power delivered to your line on account of its length in order not to give crosstalk problems.

May be at least part of the story.

I am in the same boat as you, I have seen a over 30% drop on attainable sync both up/down which doesnt sit right with me. But ultimately my line is very stable and I still have close to full sync over 70mbit so I havent bothered to report it.

I have tried a few things locally to try and rule out anything local but have concluded its crosstalk or someone swapped my pair.

The crc error bursts I originally had have stopped now on a ECI modem, so making the modem match the dslam vendor I think is important as that could on marginal lines affect DLM behaviour. I got the modem from ebay as I understand it I think openreach have a shortage of ECI modems currently.

Because they've all somehow escaped to eBay.

Thank you all for your quick and informative responses.

@RobertoS

The modem is right next to the master socket and it looks just like the picture to which you linked. There are no extensions in the house so the things connected to the master socket are the modem and a cordless phone (which has two stations).

The wireless router is a Huawei HG533

There isn't a make or model identifier on the Openreach modem


I tried to run the speed test to which you linked and got the message

"The Performance Tester is currently unable to run a speed test for your broadband connection. Please try again shortly, however if this problem persists, raise the issue with your service provider."

I don't know whether there's something wrong with some database somewhere because when I've been checking on various ISP sites they haven't been able to tell me what my anticipated speed would be or whether I can get FTTC.

if you restart the modem after unplugging the cordless phone from both mains and phone socket does it have any influence ?

The estimates on our fibre guide are based on graphs which allowed for crosstalk which was always going to be an issue with VDSL

any idea why BT slow to uptake vectoring?

I guess its because they want to finish the rollout first.

Getting stable standards based vectoring available for one. Issues over regulation and that it would mean an end to sub loop unbundling or make it more complex, even for Openreach adding a second cabinet becomes harder as they need to be close enough for DSLAM to communicate data on crosstalk management.

I suspect that some in BT may want to go more FTTP, rather than vectoring

from where I sit seems odd.

BT have spent a lot of cash in rolling out FTTC, this we can probably agree on.

To rollout FTTC without vectoring is like doing half the job, they not getting the maximum out of the investment. Vectoring has costs but compared to what the rollout has cost so far its a small % on top.

FTTP is clearly a better solution but in terms of viability is it comparable to vectoring and also that I suspect FTTP as a replacement to FTTC is still quite a while away for BT so vectoring would be in that gap.

We dont really have subloop unbundling either, as it seems unlikely sky and talk talk are going to bother with it.

Hopefully ofcom will act reasonable and not stand in the way of it.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 04-Jan-13 09:23:13)

@Everyone else....

So what you say makes sense. If there is significant variability between individial phone lines due to the state of the individual wires and there is a shortage of available spare wires then that would explain our situation.

Our switch to FTTC has not had an effect on the speed our neighbours have experienced (in fact they were watching like hawks to make sure that there wasn't such a problem) but one of our neighbours had a sudden and permanent increase in speed earlier last year. Maybe the engineer found a spare line with better quality.

With respect to the distance to the cabinet, the 3.5km was what was said by an engineer last summer. The path that he demonstrated our line took does seem consistent with that distance and it's far from the most direct route.

This morning the broadband has been up and down, down for several minutes at a time. The DSL light on the Openreach modem has been off for long periods of time and there is an audible crackle on the line.

All in all it sounds like this area has poor lines (I've heard from one of the many engineers that's been out here in the past year that there's still a lot of aluminium out here) and that they are close to capacity. I can appreaciate that BT Openreach are unwilling to invest in expensive new lines to support a small number of customers. I am also surprised that they are willing to support the cost of all these engineer visits (we've had more than 15 in the past 12 months, in total we, and the three houses which are closest have had at least 30 in the last year).

Roll on 4G.

Seems vectoring is still a bit "leading edge" and has some backwards compatibility issues

http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/techzine/3-innovation...

http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/techzine/vdsl2-vector...

I would expect BT to wait for cost effective vendor upgrades to existing cabinets to become available, along with suitable CPE upgrades / replacements. First step may be to do vectoring on say a BDUK project where there is no existing VDSL to worry about.

probably because 30 engineer visits a year is still a lot cheaper than rerouting lines, it seems rerouting lines for BT is something they consider a no go decision thats never ever viable.

If I was you I would query the engineer next time to ask how the neighbours got a different routed line, although the engineer may play dumb or just refuse to answer.

ok fair enough.

In the BT documents provided on the openreach site it does state that existing CPE is vectoring compatible tho, so its possible existing CPE wouldnt need to be replaced and indicates openreach do plan to use vectoring at some point.

If there is noise on the line then that should be reported, preferably whilst it's doing it and make sure the person you're speaking to acknowledges they can hear it. That noise is a bad connection of some sort and will affect you're broadband, but should be reported as a phone (voice) fault.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

... and indicates openreach do plan to use vectoring at some point.

Well seeing as they are trialling it ....

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

If there is noise on the line then that should be reported, preferably whilst it's doing it and make sure the person you're speaking to acknowledges they can hear it. That noise is a bad connection of some sort and will affect you're broadband, but should be reported as a phone (voice) fault.

I have done so and they (Talktalk) have indicated that it is a line fault.

The last time we reported one of these (in June last year) it took 3 months to sort out.

where?

Probably at Martlesham Heath labs

In reply to a post by yarwell:

if you restart the modem after unplugging the cordless phone from both mains and phone socket does it have any influence ?

No it does not and I have also disconnected all other devices from the wi-fi router and switched off wi-fi.

The engineer's report states that 1.8Mbps is as fast as we can expect so the issue appears to be with the length and/or quality of the connection back to the cabinet.

returning to your original question, one approach might be to get a new line put in - throw another dice and see if it comes up better. Depends how much it's worth to you really.

I had a customer whose broadband dropped from a reliable 5M to a rubbish 1M, they happened to have two lines and we persuaded the Openreach tech to change the pairs over - worked a treat.

I've just had a quick chat with my neighbour and it seems that the solution to his problem last year (which took him from no broadband and a very poor crackly telephone line to 12Mbps+ and a perfectly fine phone service) was some part that was fitted to the cabinet and which had to be ordered especially.

He's going through his notes to see whether there is anything more specific in there regarding exactly what kind of part.

so not a field trial then on real lines?

They may not be in the outside world but Martelsham has the capability to simulate real traffic on large numbers of lines within large cables and monitor the effects. This has always been there for voice and is almost certainly there for VDSL testing as the final modulation techniques for VDSL2 were defined, tested and proven by BT at Martlesham.

In reply to a post by The_Don_Wales:

In reply to a post by R0NSKI:

If there is noise on the line then that should be reported, preferably whilst it's doing it and make sure the person you're speaking to acknowledges they can hear it. That noise is a bad connection of some sort and will affect you're broadband, but should be reported as a phone (voice) fault.

I have done so and they (Talktalk) have indicated that it is a line fault.

The last time we reported one of these (in June last year) it took 3 months to sort out.

Three months to resolve a voice fault? Surely that's in breach of your contract?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

The crc error bursts I originally had have stopped now on a ECI modem, so making the modem match the dslam vendor I think is important as that could on marginal lines affect DLM behaviour. I got the modem from ebay as I understand it I think openreach have a shortage of ECI modems currently.

Does that mean you now have an unlocked ECI modem & are able to reliably collect/see the connection stats?

If so, I'd be really interested in the detail of how you have managed it as we seem to have more or less drawn a blank (stats-wise anyway).