It is very thick copper. Commonly installed during the 70s/early 80s according to the chap which is around when the house was built.

The cable from the pole looks different - like the newer black cable they use. However that goes into a small box on the wall just underneath the guttering, and this old brown non twisted pair cable comes out of that. Probably 15-20 metres of it.

We used to lose about 3-4DB on the SNR on the ADSL2 line when the sun went down, although it was stable and never dropped. I've no way to get the line stats since the ECI modem is difficult to hack and I can't be bothered really. As long as it works

The stats must be fairly good if he reckoned it is capable of 117mbps, so hopefully there is enough spare capacity there not to drop the link at night when it's noisier...

Is the night time noise floor as relevant at the frequencies VDSL2 uses? Certainly once into FM band (whcih VDSL is not, but closer to than ADSL) this effect seems to be less.

I agree the VDSL it is not in the VHF / FM frequency band but the background radiation from those does not really change over night.

It is the many transmitters down in the LF, MF and HF bands that will be picked up and there are a lot of those around. Many years back I designed a small transmitter running at 2182 kHz - at night it could be received in Cyprus (from the North of Scotland) and further afield.

Will try to do some RF reading over the weekend

Typically an MF or HF transmitter range will double or treble over night. LF - 30 to 300kHz, MF - 300kHz to 3MHz and HF - 3 to 30 MHz. Radio 4 is on 1500metres or 198kHz, there are many European stations that can be received at night that transmit in the same band.

My noise margin varies much less over 24 hours on FTTC than it did on ADSL & 2+. Less than 1dB, whereas it was a fairly consistent 3.5dB. The DECT phone still gives it a fair kicking though.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 09-Nov-12 12:43:36)

HF band is the key one for VDSL

He told me I was only the 3rd connection in the cab aswell, so it will be interesting to see how crosstalk affects it as more people sign up.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

HF band is the key one for VDSL

For the top end downstream frequencies suffering high attenuation yes. However, even LF and MF will affect the lower end frequencies. I have seen Bin usage graphs of friends in the Elgin area (Hopeman and Lossiemouth exchanges) which have notches at 198, 693 and 810 kHz adversely affecting their ADSL upstream and downstream service.

I have lost around 110-12 Mbps typically 15% from the maximum attainable.