In reply to a post by Computerman142:

Doesn't FTTC have a 10 day training period?, if so is it best to wait until after the 10 days before I fit the telephone cable?

Yes, or similar, but the crucial thing is that it will "train" it to the best that your alarm cable will do, i.e. it'll possibly mess you up permanently, even if you do install proper twisted copper after that period.

The BT guys here will be able to tell you exactly what cable to order if you're going to do it yourself.

Edited by gazzyk1ns (Tue 02-Apr-13 22:20:28)

And worse still, if the dodgy cable is causing errors, expect to see drops in your sync speed, and interleaving will kick in, in the next day or two.

The difference between 6W & 4W is the amount of pairs of wires I believe 6 way & 4 way I think.

You are best to use CAT5 cable, and make sure you use a true pair not any two wires.

The commonly used pair is Blue (possibly with white markings) with White+Blue markings.

If you do use phone cabling it needs to be CW1308 and twisted pairs, as the others have said. Cheap, flat, untwisted pair cable is not recommended.

The reason is that any wire can be subject to external interference. The two wires of a twisted pair get affected in opposite ways, so to some extent self-cancelling out the interference. If you use untwisted, or two random wires that aren't a matching pair, the interference is reinforced rather than largely cancelled.

Don't mess for the first 3 days. By then the things that actually control your line will have decided what to do, though you may get a few decreases in speed after that. You won't do any harm as long as you make sure you wire it up correctly, as above.

The 10-day period is/was basically to do with the BT Wholesale recording of the lowest sync speed on ADSLx in order to set fault reporting criteria. On FTTC all the BT Wholesale DLM seems to do is set the IP Profile. The line setup itself is by the Openreach DLM. The fault criteria are totally different - and pre-determined. As is what the OR DLM does about instable lines. It doesn't use the Noise Margin settings like the BT Wholesale ADSLx system. It uses speed bands to limit the maximum and minimum sync.

OK I will see how it goes for now as its been 1 day and 2 hours since the installation and my speeds are still 25Mbps but I will see how things go. If it slows down to much I will get some CAT5 or CAT5e to replace the alarm cable with.

You should run a loose piece of cat5e cable and re-sync to see what speed you get.

Once the system sets you sync speed it is going to be a pain to get it reconfigured.

You want to get this sorted out ASAP. The first 10 days after you get it installed are crucial.

Edited by worldofadsl (Wed 03-Apr-13 15:30:24)

I think the general consensus is that if a fault is fixed the system will eventually increase the speed back up without a DLM reset.

Very few users get banded/stuck profiles, so it shouldn't have any long term affects once the alarm cable is changed.

I think just as worldofadsl said I may try some loose cat5e to see if it makes a difference to the speed and if not I just guess that's what I get I suppose.

I must admit i'm still bemused as to why you didn't just rip it out and wire it up properly before he came *shakes head*

I have decorated the room about a year ago. But finished up the areas where there wires are coming in to the house and where the alarm cable is about 5 months ago. So that why I didn't rip out the wiring as I didn't want to re decorate. But I will replace the cable in the future when I need to re do the area where the wires are as it located under a trim next to the back door and there are cracks starting to appear.

Hint:

Wiring should really be done in ducting so that you can use the old wiring to pull through new wiring if you ever need to upgrade.

Probably too late in this case, but useful for others reading this.