Severely crippled connection

Hello. As of about a week, my connection has been heavily crippled. Please excuse me if this is in the wrong place, perhaps you might advise me where to go

At first, it was just offline completely until around 1 or 2am at night. If it went down after that, usually a router restart or two allowed it to come back up. The connection at this point was unbearable. Webpages either loaded incredibly slowly, or just knocked the connection offline. I couldn't access my router through 192.168.1.1 during this time, just wouldn't allow me in. (though I haven't had to do that for a very long time and chances were I just changed the password from the default and couldn't remember it, maybe)
I factory reset the router and things improved, a little. Connection was up in the day time, though it will go down every 5-10 minutes. Webpages are unbearably slow to load, if at all. Some websites just knock it offline.

In short, my connection isn't usable for anything. Goes offline every 5-10 mins and even then, sometimes it doesn't come back without a router reset.

Here's a speedtest I did, same results a few times. http://www.speedtest.net/result/1886043906.png

So here's what I've tried.

Called Orange to report a line fault, and they told me everything looked alright from my end. They asked me to pick the phone up and see if there was noise or a crackle on the line, and there was.
I called my phone provider which is also Orange, and they told me everything was alright on their end as well. The man asked me to plug my phone line directly into the socket rather than through the filter, and that made no difference.

I've tried a wired connection, a wireless connection, two different routers, two different microfilters. Nothing changed. My phone, tablet, and other computers in the house have the same problem.

At this point basically Orange have said it's not their problem, and we need to get an engineer over to fix it, which will cost £105. Anything an engineer can do I'm sure we can figure out, right?! The customer support guy just said it might be the phone socket in the wall that has broken. He suggested using a different phone handset and see if the noise disappeared, but that wouldn't explain why the internet dies too, would it.

I'm going crazy trying to fix this. Please help? Or at least point me in the direction?

Thanks.

Sounds like your routers broken but, from the crackle on your phone line means it can't be.

Try plugging in your router/phone to the test socket and try again

Edited by deleted (Wed 11-Apr-12 15:29:59)

and give us the router stats from the test socket?

Downstream Upstream
SNR Margin 17.0 8.0 db
Line Attenuation 47.5 31.5 db
Data Rate 352 448 kbps
POWER: 13.0 12.0 dbm
CRC :0 214

I think they're the test results you're speaking of? But that's just from the set up I have now. I'm a bit basic What is a test socket/where might I find it?

You are using the master socket? Looking at your master socket, does its faceplate have a horizontal split in it? Remove the bottom half (2 screws) and a test socket will be revealed. Plug filtered router, w/out phone, in that and get stats.

Does removed half of faceplate have any wires connected to back of it?

Downstream Upstream
SNR Margin 17.0 9.0 db
Line Attenuation 46.5 31.5 db
Data Rate 928 448 kbps
POWER 16.5 12.0 dbm
CRC 21 14

Those are the stats from just the filtered router without the phone.

I unscrewed the faceplate to the socket and all there was was a bunch of wires, no other socket. I'll look around my house to see if there's anything else like what you described.

Better but not very good. You should be getting a Down Data Rate of 5 to 6 Meg.

Can you identify your socket(s) from BT sockets and Line Jack Units?

It's one of the LJUs, not sure exactly which one but it's definitely not the NTE Master that you described, I'm fairly sure there's no such thing in the house :/

It's become clear now that this isn't going to fix itself Been away a few days. The data rate on the router has gone up to 5k and 3k on two occasions when I had looked, but the speed test still shows 0.10mb dl speed, and then the data rate will drop dramatically anyway after a disconnect.

Anyone have any thoughts as to what I should do?

What are results from http://www.speedtester.bt.com/ at times Data Rate (Sync Speed) is high and low. Post results in conjunction with the router stats you have been posting before. N.B. You can only run BT speedtester no more than once an hour.

Monitor these regularly and report back.

What exchange?

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 15-Apr-12 23:59:21)