Can anyone give me some advice please......

Hello everyone i'm new to this forum and was after a bit of advice if i may?
I recently moved to a house which is about 8km from the exchange. When i had the line installed i recieved a very stable connection of around 1 meg. However, my IP profile at the time was 1000kbps but it keeps lowering to 750 as i'm on adsl max.

I think i understand that the profile is dynamic meaning it constantly changes but everytime i phone BT to reset the profile it only stays at 1000kbps for around 3 days before dropping off again. They sent an engineer out who told me there was no noise on the line but he could detect errors which given the long length of the line was not unexpected and almost impossible to find. I assume this is why my profile keeps dropping.

What i wonder is can they lock my ip profile to a meg or perhaps provide me with a fixed 1 meg connection (not on max) and would this be of benefit or become unstable? Having 4 connections running off the line i really need every last drop of bandwidth!

Any advice would be great as i'm going round in circles talking to india every other day. No one seems to understand my issue at BT. Do they have any tech centres in the uk?? Many thanks in advance.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Any advice would be great as i'm going round in circles talking to india every other day. No one seems to understand my issue at BT. Do they have any tech centres in the uk?? Many thanks in advance.

The problem is that in all likelihood the system is doing what it ought to. It's designed to trade off speed for stability so what's probably happening is that your line is not stable enough at 1Mb and the system keeps dropping it in order to stabilise it.

You *might* be able to improve this if you look at your own internal wiring:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm

If you could post your router stats here we can better comment on the connection as well.

It also might be possible to get your ISP to put you on a fixed speed service.

Firstly,many thanks for the reply. I'm no longer anonymous either!

Regarding router stats, the only test i have run is the bt speed tester. If this is not in depth enough perhaps you could forward a good link so i can provide more results.

The stats are as follows:

Download: 688kbps
Upload: 355kbps
IP Profile: 750 kbps
IP throughput: 1260kbps (this varies sometimes by 100kbps or so)

Also the engineer told me that the line had approx 70db (noise?).
Hope this helps.

Regarding the fixed speed i just cannot seem to communicate this to BT and end up going round in circles performing the same tests time after time. Would a fixed 1meg connection be stable given the throughput the line is capable of?

In reply to a post by rael1979:

The stats are as follows:

Download: 688kbps
Upload: 355kbps
IP Profile: 750 kbps
IP throughput: 1260kbps (this varies sometimes by 100kbps or so)

I don't want to be awkward, but those figures look as though you have cobbled them together from several different readings.

As a set they are impossible.

Can you copy and paste the full text results (we don't need the silly graph) from a BT Speed Test, and to get your line stats have a look here for help. Again please copy and paste them all.

Yeah they were results from what i could remember from a test this morning. It has 3 hour intervals. Here are the results in full:

Download speedachieved during the test was - 671 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 200-1000 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :1088 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 352 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 750 Kbps

router stats:

ADSL settings
VPI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation ITU-T G.992.1
Latency type Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up) 8.1 dB / 8.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 63.5 dB / 31.5 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 16.0 dBm / 12.4 dBm

Right, that's better .

In short it looks like you are stuck , though there are a few things that might help a little.

That attenuation of 63.5dB (attenuation increases with distance) is the highest that routers generally report. It is almost certainly higher in fact. I'm afraid there is no way BT will put you on a fixed speed 1Mbps connection at that distance/attenuation. So we have to try to maximise what you have.

The first thing is to check the wiring at your master socket, as per the link Andrue gave you. That can make a big difference.

Next, are you connecting to the phone line with the short ADSL cable, or at a fixed extension, or using a plug-in extension?

Third, for the moment try always to connect well inside daylight hours. This gives the highest connection speed. During dawn and dusk it is lower, and at night lower still.

I might advise differently later when we have more facts. In particular the connection speed you need to achieve is 1152kbps. If you get that do not try to get any higher, as the higher you go the less stable the line will be. So if we find it connects quite a bit higher it may be an idea to edge into connecting at dawn or dusk.

Do not reconnect/re-sync more than 4 or 5 times in an hour. That makes the system think the line is unstable and it then lowers your speed in the medium-term. See the next paragraph.

The other thing is the noise margin of 8.1dB may be because noise has decreased since you connected (as the standard setting at connection time is 6dB), or because of instability you have been put on a connection time setting of 9dB. The settings always go in 3dB steps.

If you are on a 9dB setting that is costing you 500-750kbps connection speed.

What I would like you to do is a reconnection within the next hour or so and post the stats taken immediately afterwards. That will tell us the figure as it will be close to but not equal to 6dB or 9dB. What we do next and how you proceed depends on that.

Good luck .

(Sorry if I sounded a bit hard in the earlier post. I didn't know how to express it better, but you can see now why we need accurate info.)

Thanks for your help and no problem about earlier (sorry i got the stats wrong in the first place).

Ok, here's the stats taken when i reconnected my line.

Line state Connected
Connection time 0 days, 0:00:39
Downstream 1,152 Kbps
Upstream 352 Kbps


ADSL settings
VPI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation ITU-T G.992.1
Latency type Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up) 6.8 dB / 7.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 63.5 dB / 31.5 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 15.9 dBm / 12.4 dBm

I looked into the socket diagrams and it appears i have an Openreach socket. There are only 2 wires connected at the back. The ringwire is not connected. i think this is the socket with the i plate built in. (apologies if i'm wrong on that)

I have only 1 socket in the house connected as BT thought that would give me maximum chance of getting the best speed.

The speed check stats are from my ethernet connection, it is the only computer connected at the time and I'm not using any extensions of any kind.

Once again thanks for the help. I've learned more on here than in 2 months on the phone with BT!

Well that's good news and bad news I'm afraid.

First, after probably 4 or 5 days if you can hold that connection speed you will get a profile of 1000kbps. The chances are low as I'm sure you realise. See this FAQ for more detail about profiles, and the speed table.

As long as you can stay at 864kbps or above, at least the profile will not go below 750kbps.

The second thing, both good and bad, is it seems your "target" noise margin is 6dB (good). That means there is no scope for improvement (bad).

The bad news, on thinking about your upstream connection speed, is that the attenuation is indeed much higher than the router is saying. The highest upstream figure reported is 31.5dB corresponding to the download 63.5dB. It is very rare indeed for a line that is much use at all not to get the full upstream 448kbps.

I don't really think there is anything else I at least can say to help except for a final piece of advice. Accept it and stop worrying BT about it. If you do so much more there are only two possible outcomes. Both would be intended to solve the instability.

The better of the two would be that they put you on a fixed 512kbps speed (576kbps sync and 288kbps upstream).

The worse of the two, admittedly unlikely, would be that they would declare the line no longer capable of supporting broadband and disconnect the ADSL.

When the latter happens it is irreversible. The first would also be pretty fixed I imagine.

What you have is far better than either.

Wow! i didn't realise that BT could simply declare the line not capable of supporting a DSL connection. Thats pretty harsh.

I'm sure you can imagine that the (roughly) 250kbps drop in speed hinders me substantially but its still better than having no line at all.

Thanks for your help, i'm a little wiser about this now. I've logged the "not spot" on the map and just hope that someday BT upgrade our network and bring us in line with the rest of the world.

Great forum by the way. I think i'll stick around.

Yep, the NotSpot is a good idea.

As I said, it's unlikely they would kill the line - but it has often happened where people have reported a bad problem at slightly lower speeds than yours. I reckon a fixed 512kbps might just appear out of the blue though if you go any further. They wouldn't ask, it would be just an engineer on a bad hair day.

See you around.