Router says I'm connected but nothing will work.

Hi

I just joined the forum today but been trying to get my head around the very useful advice here for a few weeks now.

I've been a Ukonline customer for many years, from payg dialup to DSL as soon as it came available in my area (Midlothian).

A few months ago we had a visit from a Talk Talk rep selling their product door to door who said they were working at our exchange ready for releasing new products and I could put in an advance order. I asked if this explained the problems I was currently having with dropped and slow connections especially at peak times. He said it probably was.

But it's never got better, for months now, we have had brilliant connection during the day time then in the evening or weekend it's almost impossible to use the internet even though the router is saying we are connected. About a month ago we finally got some progress with Ukonline's support who offered to upgrade us to an 8MB package to see if that would help. On it's good times this is definitely faster than our old deal but it still is virtually unusable in the evenings.

As part of the diagnostic process prior to all this we have bought and installed a Bti Plate in the phone socket, moved the router to plug directly into the main socket. There are no other phone lines in the house. This did not make any significant improvement.

My router is a BT Voyager 2100

My router stats at a time when connection is fast are:

Line mode G.dmt Line state Show Time
Latency Type Interleave Line Up Time 00:03:26:45
Line Coding Trellis On Line Up Count 1

Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 8096 Kbps 448 Kbps
Noise Margin 10.2 dB 26.0 dB
Line Attenuation 14.5 dB 9.0 dB
Output Power 19.8 dBm 12.1 dBm
K 254 15
R 20 16
S 1 8
D 64 4
Super Frames 729263 729261
Super Frame Errors 2 0
RS Words 99179810 6198718
RS Correctable Errors 469 0
RS Uncorrectable Errors 6 0
HEC Errors 1 0
OCD Errors 0 0
LCD Errors 0 0
ES Errors 0 0

The broadband availability checker gives the following message:

"Your exchange is ADSL enabled, and our initial test on your line indicates that your line should be able to have an ADSL broadband service that provides a fixed line rate up to 2Mbps.

Our test also indicates that your line currently supports a potential ADSL Max broadband line rate of 7.5Mbps or greater."

I've installed Router Stats Lite and monitored what happened during bad spells this evening and the lowest the noise margin dipped to was around 8dB At those times, even though the router still appeared connected, any attempt to ping external servers simply failed.

When I was able to use the internet again I used the broadband tester which showed my download speed during the test was 3647Kbps and my acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150Kbps. The IP profile is 6500Kbps.


I hope those are the right details to give. A few weeks ago I'd never heard of SNR or LLU and I'm still grappling to make sense of it all.

I'd very much appreciate some guidance of where we go from here in trying to sort this out. Thank you.

Never buy from doorstep salesmen!

Yeah, I didn't! I only mentioned that because it all seems to tie in with work Talk Talk did at the exchange but no one actually ever seems to find anything wrong.

The fact that you are basically getting a full sync on your router and that you only get the slow down at peak times indicates that it is either the exchange is congested or it is your ISP not having enough capacity. You could opt to change ISP if the latter is the issue.

It would be useful to know what exchange you are on this site will help.

Edit. On reading your post again I would hazard a guess the TalkTalk have installed their own equipment at the exchange, called LLU, the site I linked to will show what is available.

Edited by Sadoldman (Sun 13-Dec-09 10:04:53)