Having a really strange issue with my VDSL

Back in September (the 20th) I moved from BT Broadband to Vodafone due to the offer at the time being excellent. When I was with BT I used to get a downstream sync of around 65-69Mbps and I was generally happy with the connection, pings were great, uptime was brilliant and in the 1000s of hours.

However ever since I've moved to Vodafone I've been having issues, sometimes the connection is fine for days, but then I'll get 5-7 drops over a 12 hour period. I've been plugged into the master socket/test socket since the connection went live, I had to otherwise it wouldn't even connect! My downstream sync is now 55Mbps, but weirdly despite all the drops hasn't dropped down any further than 55Mbps

An example of that is here:
09-11-2017

Yet last week:
03-11-2017

Vodafone are struggling to figure this out and seem to be against sending an engineer out, trying to blame my house wiring (again, I'm in the master socket), they blame me for using HomePlugs, an AppleTV, basically anything they can think of. They even suggested I go out and buy my own Modem/Router at a cost to myself! I'm getting really frustrated now. Yet the only thing that has changed is I unplugged my BT HomeHub and plugged in Vodafone's router.

Any one have any idea what might be going on with my connection?

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Nov-17 10:55:05)

In reply to a post by ollie87:

Vodafone are struggling to figure this out and seem to be against sending an engineer out,

I'm not surprised as what you posted gives nothing to go on

trying to blame my house wiring (again, I'm in the master socket),

that means nothing, you need to be in the test socket

they blame me for using HomePlugs, an AppleTV, basically anything they can think of.

all of these could cause a problem

They even suggested I go out and buy my own Modem/Router at a cost to myself! I'm getting really frustrated now. Yet the only thing that has changed is I unplugged my BT HomeHub and plugged in Vodafone's router.

The vodafone router is known to have problems

Any one have any idea what might be going on with my connection?

What are the actual problems you have?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by ollie87:

Vodafone are struggling to figure this out and seem to be against sending an engineer out,

I'm not surprised as what you posted gives nothing to go on

trying to blame my house wiring (again, I'm in the master socket),

that means nothing, you need to be in the test socket

they blame me for using HomePlugs, an AppleTV, basically anything they can think of.

all of these could cause a problem

They even suggested I go out and buy my own Modem/Router at a cost to myself! I'm getting really frustrated now. Yet the only thing that has changed is I unplugged my BT HomeHub and plugged in Vodafone's router.

The vodafone router is known to have problems

Any one have any idea what might be going on with my connection?

What are the actual problems you have?

Someone didn't do reading comprehension in Primary School.

The Vodafone router has poor wifi.

If you stream video to Wifi devices or have more that 6 of them I would switch of the Wifi on the Vodafone router, connect it to your BT router with an ethernet cable, disable the DHCP on the BT router, and make sure that it has an IP address which is outside the DHCP of the Vodafone router and does not confict with the Vodafone router.

For Vodafone, I use a 2nd hand Zyxel VMG8924-B10A bought on ebay for less than £25.

Are you in the master socket or test socket?

Different modems will handle the noise pick up issues slightly differently so the Home Hub may have held on through the noise bursts if short where as the Vodafone modem is not. How this sort of thing is handled is one of the differences between different modems.

The test socket is important, as if just in the usual master socket the effect of noise on the extensions is still a factor for VDSL, i.e. those extensions need isolating in noise terms via a faceplate filter.

As for Home Plugs it is possible they are an issue, they do share similar radio spectrum so you cannot discount them.

So in terms of ideas its strip it down to test socket and no Home Plugs and see if things improve, if they do then start using HomePlugs again and if all well still you'll know it was not them.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

The Vodafone router has poor wifi.

If you stream video to Wifi devices or have more that 6 of them I would switch of the Wifi on the Vodafone router, connect it to your BT router with an ethernet cable, disable the DHCP on the BT router, and make sure that it has an IP address which is outside the DHCP of the Vodafone router and does not confict with the Vodafone router.

For Vodafone, I use a 2nd hand Zyxel VMG8924-B10A bought on ebay for less than £25.

Nothing to do with Wi-Fi in this case, it's WAN drops. Which Vodafone confirm they can see happening.

I no longer than the BT HomeHub as I sent that back to BT.

Also I don't tend to stream video over Wi-Fi, I use HomePlugs for the following devices:

1. Gaming PC upstairs
2. Gaming PC downstairs
3. AppleTV

Don't think its Wi-Fi issues or load crashing router as the BQM shows jumps in base line latency so the DLM system may be learning its optimum position in terms of interleaving. G.INP etc

If the Vodafone modem is less stable than the HomeHub this might end up in slower speeds

Keep bidding to get a bargain Zyxel for my 2nd line to replace old ECI modem, the little cheap VDSL2 modems e.g. TP-Link W9970 used to just do the simple modem task do really well compared to the bundled stuff.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Are you in the master socket or test socket?

Different modems will handle the noise pick up issues slightly differently so the Home Hub may have held on through the noise bursts if short where as the Vodafone modem is not. How this sort of thing is handled is one of the differences between different modems.

The test socket is important, as if just in the usual master socket the effect of noise on the extensions is still a factor for VDSL, i.e. those extensions need isolating in noise terms via a faceplate filter.

As for Home Plugs it is possible they are an issue, they do share similar radio spectrum so you cannot discount them.

So in terms of ideas its strip it down to test socket and no Home Plugs and see if things improve, if they do then start using HomePlugs again and if all well still you'll know it was not them.

Yes, sorry it's the test socket. I have the latest Openreach NTE5C socket and I've removed the faceplate and I've tried several different filters. It's also worth noting that I don't have any other phone sockets in the house any way.

If I'm not using HomePlugs then I have to use Wi-Fi and I don't find it in any way acceptable due to the amount of jitter it seems to introduce into my online gaming. The BT HomeHub seemed to cope just fine with it.

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Nov-17 11:16:08)

In reply to a post by ollie87:

Someone didn't do reading comprehension in Primary School.

Lol, no need to say thanks, you're welcome.

In reply to a post by ollie87:

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

The Vodafone router has poor wifi.

If you stream video to Wifi devices or have more that 6 of them I would switch of the Wifi on the Vodafone router, connect it to your BT router with an ethernet cable, disable the DHCP on the BT router, and make sure that it has an IP address which is outside the DHCP of the Vodafone router and does not confict with the Vodafone router.

For Vodafone, I use a 2nd hand Zyxel VMG8924-B10A bought on ebay for less than £25.

Nothing to do with Wi-Fi in this case, it's WAN drops. Which Vodafone confirm they can see happening.

I no longer than the BT HomeHub as I sent that back to BT.

Also I don't tend to stream video over Wi-Fi, I use HomePlugs for the following devices:

1. Gaming PC upstairs
2. Gaming PC downstairs
3. AppleTV

WAN drops or sync drops? It�s cruical that we know whether your router is losing sync with the Openreach cabinet or not.

This is where monitoring the active SNR margin comes into play...

Some software bugs may cause a router scram and reboot

So test the hypothesis for just a night and see if turning off the HomePlugs makes a difference?

Thinking they won't and knowing they are not affecting you are two different things.

If gaming is hyper critical while HomePlugs are great their tendency to have more jitter than an Ethernet cable would mean you should be replacing them with a cable where at all possible.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

So test the hypothesis for just a night and see if turning off the HomePlugs makes a difference?

Thinking they won't and knowing they are not affecting you are two different things.

If gaming is hyper critical while HomePlugs are great their tendency to have more jitter than an Ethernet cable would mean you should be replacing them with a cable where at all possible.

Thing is, I don't get drops every night. Sometimes for an entire week it'll be fine. Then for a 12-48 hour period I'll get a load of drops then it'll be fine again. Surely if the HomePlugs were causing issues it'd be more often? Especially since one of the gaming PCs plugged in via HomePlugs is no nearly 24/7.

Sadly running cable isn't feasible in this case, I wish I were.

Edited by deleted (Thu 09-Nov-17 13:38:14)

I know for a fact that Home plugs can cause drop outs, I�ve abandoned mine as they were causing my line to drop randomly. I highly recommend trying them off for a week to see if you experience any drop outs, if you do, try moving the Home plugs to a different mains socket and see if that improves things.

The Vodafone modem/router is absolutely useless.
If you have access to a different modem then I recommend trying that for a bit. It's likely your problems will stop.

If any of your sockets/mains wiring is adjacent to the BT line then the use of Homeplugs can cause havoc with FTTC. When I enable my Homeplugs my Retx counters increase from 0-100 per min to 10,000+ per min. That's with the BT Homeplugs that tend to place nice, other models can be MUCH worse.

In reply to a post by gigaplant:

I know for a fact that Home plugs can cause drop outs, I�ve abandoned mine as they were causing my line to drop randomly. I highly recommend trying them off for a week to see if you experience any drop outs, if you do, try moving the Home plugs to a different mains socket and see if that improves things.

Going to try this tomorrow, I've ordered a long ethernet cable I hope to hide to run across the otherside of the room, then run the Homeplugs over the other end of the room.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

In reply to a post by ollie87:

Going to try this tomorrow, I've ordered a long ethernet cable I hope to hide to run across the otherside of the room, then run the Homeplugs over the other end of the room.

that may work, and is worth trying. however, it may also still fail, since the homeplugs put noise into all of the house wiring, as well as any locally radiated noise.

Just to add to this, with Sky TV, you get a Sky TV box, and a Sky router. You then have a bunch of secondary TV boxes around the house for multiroom.

The Sky system supports linking every TV box over both WiFi and PowerLine, Sky have actually entirely disabled the powerline system and on new routers they don't even support it, as it was found to cause VDSL drop-outs. Now everything on Sky Q, all the TV boxes, main router and WiFi boosters have to link over WiFi.

When you mention WiFi causes higher latency, it certainly should not if using 5Ghz with a decent reception.

Without question powerline / homeplugs = VDSL drop outs in plenty of homes, mine included.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 09-Nov-17 22:14:22)

My Sky Q multiroom system is ethernet connected. No wifi or powerline at all.

Mine is wireless, by default if you get an engineer out they make it all wireless.
A key selling point is the fact you can do multiroom without wires.

I have a whole bunch of Sky Q WiFI boosters all over my home to ensure the signals strong enough everywhere to pull 4K video over WiFi.

I asked an engineer to run ethernet, as getting to the back of the house we have 3 boosters (as he wanted an RSSI of less than -60dbm at each booster), he just refused. To date it has worked quite nicely.

I could run ethernet, true, but that would be by myself.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 09-Nov-17 22:42:40)

There's actually two versions of the latest hub, the Sky Q hub (ER110) and Sky Hub 3 (ER115, no powerline). The one that doesn't support powerline is supposed to be supplied to customers that have Sky Fibre Max and don't have Sky Q but unfortunately they occasionally get sent out to customers with Sky Q.

One point. Sky haven't abandoned powerline yet but that's all I have to say about that.

By default power line is turned off on the router, even the one that supports it.

Yes you can manually go in and turn it on but plenty of people on sky forum claiming that�s caused drops with sky replying powerline is not supported at this time.

I've gotten rid of my Homeplugs and I'm still getting drops.

Here is last night: a near two hour drop

In reply to a post by ollie87:

I've gotten rid of my Homeplugs and I'm still getting drops.

Here is last night: a near two hour drop

To confirm you have no internet for 2 solid hours? Is there a dial tone on the landline at this time? No ISP can ignore 2 hour solid drops.

Phone had a dial tone.

DOH misread the previous post - so ignore me

Edited by MrSaffron (Thu 16-Nov-17 15:00:41)

The poster said they did have dial tone.

I'll go sit in the naughty corner for a while

Best you do that very thing

Have you confirmed it drops in the router stats? Does rebooting router fix these drops?

Have VF issued an engineer yet?

Edited by ukhardy07 (Thu 16-Nov-17 19:04:30)

Router just says stuff like:

16.11.2017 20:22:28 WAN connected, WAN type: WAN PTM over DSL, service type: data, IP: 90.254.98.247, device: ppp2 WAN

16.11.2017 20:20:56 WAN disconnected, WAN type: WAN PTM over DSL, service type: data, device: ppp2 WAN

Which isn't super helpful, there are lots of CRC errors. But I can't figure it out. Reboots do nothing aside from it just takes a lot longer to reconnect.

Vodafone seem very unwilling to send an engineer! They can't even seem to figure out how to put me on hold without hanging up on me.

Edited by deleted (Thu 16-Nov-17 20:34:25)

On the face of it, that looks more like you've lost PPPoE rather than sync.

Are those the only messages?

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

On the face of it, that looks more like you've lost PPPoE rather than sync.

Are those the only messages?

Sadly, yes. The router is such a piece of [censored]!

Ah well, at least you can have custom DNS unlike BT.

(This is working on the basis that we can't tell if it lost sync, or lost PPP)

As an experiment, you could try just manually unplugging the router from the phone line, then restoring it a while later, and checking whether you get any different log messages. Preferably at a time that you aren't afflicted by the problem.

Another step would be trying to monitor the number of CRC errors over time, to see if there is any correlation to the times that you see errors.

Another step would be to swap to a different modem that can be monitored easily with software. Even if you couldn't then make a PPP connection to Vodafone, you would at least get an idea of how stable the sync is.