Line fault between pole and cabinet (possibly)

Had a BTO engineer round today to investigate a sudden (& permanent) drop in sync from 3.4 - 4.0mpbs to 0.8mbps. He spent well over the normal 2 hours; pronounced the household wiring good to the pole, went over to the cabinet (about 50 yards down the road) and said he was reading 4+mbps on the exchange side, but the pole was only getting about 0.8mbps from the cabinet. He left saying give it a couple of days to see if anything re-sets as a result of his tinkering around, then raise the fault again for further investigation.

Any ideas what the problem could be? The engineer was baffled by it. More importantly is the solution likely to involve digging up the road / pathway. It's a private road & we have just paid to have the thing resurfaced - I'd hate to have the neighbour's nice new tarmac ripped up so soon after. Is the cable from cabinet to pole normally ducted or just buried?

If what he says is true then it's a joint has come adrift/ gone HR somewhere. It's almost certain that no digging will take place. The engineer will almost certainly certainly fix it by finding a spare pair to bypass the fault.
I've been unlucky but every pair swap that I've been subjected to has resulted in a noticeable degradation in my line quality. Pair swaps are obviously a naturally and rapidly diminishing quickfix that will soon I hope, be completely exhausted.

Edited by Deadbeat (Wed 06-Apr-11 02:42:38)

hmmmm, thanks for the reply Db. I have a feeling he might have tried that already

In reply to a post by bgriffiths:

Had a BTO engineer round today to investigate a sudden (& permanent) drop in sync from 3.4 - 4.0mpbs to 0.8mbps. He spent well over the normal 2 hours; pronounced the household wiring good to the pole, went over to the cabinet (about 50 yards down the road) and said he was reading 4+mbps on the exchange side, but the pole was only getting about 0.8mbps from the cabinet. He left saying give it a couple of days to see if anything re-sets as a result of his tinkering around, then raise the fault again for further investigation.

????
So he left without getting a 4Mbps connection at the premises?

It would be truly amazing if some "tinkering around" at the cabinet had a delayed effect on that. I think he had to bail out because at 2 hours he had already run out of allocated time and to justify it he booked the fault as cleared.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

????
So he left without getting a 4Mbps connection at the premises?

yes; I'm stuck on 864k down / 832k up

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

It would be truly amazing if some "tinkering around" at the cabinet had a delayed effect on that. I think he had to bail out because at 2 hours he had already run out of allocated time and to justify it he booked the fault as cleared.

That's what I thought, although his van was still parked next to the cabinet over an hour later (could just have been having his sandwiches I guess). I shall give it until tomorrow then raise it again - hopefully his write-up will be there for the next guy. At least my home wiring has been cleared, which is comforting

Brian

is there any correlation between when the road surfacing being done and the fault arising?

In reply to a post by ggremlin:

is there any correlation between when the road surfacing being done and the fault arising?

Don't think so - that was finished well over a month ago, the adsl drop was sudden, just after midnight on 31/3. As far as I know the contractors just scraped the surface enough to get a decent layer of tarmac down. I'll ask the neighbours if they had any extra work done which involved digging down. Hope they did - then I won't feel so bad when BT come and rip it up

Brian

He spent well over the normal 2 hours

Most broadband repair tasks are now LLU SFI2, and there is no 2 hour rule for these. Truth be told, I believe they have waived it for the original SFI tasks also.

Any ideas what the problem could be? The engineer was baffled by it.

That'll be an HR fault on the D-side then, his required PQ test should have highlighted this, showing itself as a large imbalance between the ohms readings on each leg. Then a TDR should hopefully pinpoint the problem.

Second engineer has been. Unlike the previous he is a local chap, often in the village, & said there are others nearby with similar problem. He has fiddled about at the cabinet switching the wires both sides; speed has increased to about 1500k downstream and the line is now stable, but still nowhere near the usual 3000-4000k.

He advised if no further improvement over the weekend ISP to re-raise as a possible fault at the exchange. I don't really understand that - if BTO are aware that there is an issue affecting a number of connections, why can they not put 2 and 2 together and assume ownership of what is likely to be a common problem?

Spooky, I have an almost identical problem.
Used to get at least 3.4mbps then dropped to approx 1mbps.
BTO engineer got 1.2mbps at the pole, approx 4mbps at the street cab.
Eventually OFCOM engineer found a source of REIN interference coming from neighbours house a few doors away.
After that sorted, speed went up to a flakey 3mbps, then 2.5mbps this winter, now around 2mbps.
No noise on phone and my ISP has decided to cap my line at 2mbps to make it stable !
I wish you luck getting this sorted. BT can't find a voice fault on my line so don't care.
ISP thinks 2mbps is acceptable, so aren't willing to pursue this despite my attenuation reporting as 49db !

ISP has raised the fault for the third time. My attenuation is 47.9, so 3.5mb should be fairly easy, currently stuck on 1.5mb. Both engineers agree there's a fault somewhere, one of them has visited several sites nearby. I have now had contact with two of them, identical symptoms and timeframes. I'm hoping BT's fault logging system is set up to spot multiple reports

In reply to a post by bgriffiths:

I'm hoping BT's fault logging system is set up to spot multiple reports

It isn't!

Even within one fault report, if a second visit is by a different engineer he sees nothing about what the first one did .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by bgriffiths:

I'm hoping BT's fault logging system is set up to spot multiple reports

It isn't!

Even within one fault report, if a second visit is by a different engineer he sees nothing about what the first one did .

Then I / we are surely doomed....

It is as I feared. BT have come backfollowing the third logging of the fault saying there is nothing more they can do. "a D+E side swap has been done, the FTR has been recalculated on this line so the sync no longer shows a fault". They can only suggest reprovisioning, which of course will not cure the problem as it is a general fault in the area affecting an unknown number of households.

How do we get BT to pull its corporate finger out and investigate it as a general problem rather than an individual one?

BrianG

In reply to a post by bgriffiths:

... the FTR has been recalculated on this line so the sync no longer shows a fault

That is worthy of an OfCom complaint.

The whole point of the FTR is to show up potential faults. Re-running the 10-day training to eliminate it, which is what has been done, has to be simply appalling business practice if it was done deliberately to achieve this, or the action of extremely badly trained staff is it was done for any other purpose.

It certainly ought to go to BT High Level Complaints.

Hi bgriffiths,

If you'd like us to take a look at this for you send in your details via the "Contact Us" form below and we'll take a closer look at the fault for you.

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/contact_email/c/4950

Thanks,

Stephanie

That's a nice offer - did you see the OP is using BT via EntaNet? In the past you've only been able to help BT Broadband customers - has that changed (which would be good for all of us using BT lines)?

can you get your stats up for us mate?

i am somewhat baffled by this, whereabouts are you?

hmm - I'm sure I'd posted a "thankyou" to Stephanie.
I too thought BT Care was only for BT Broadband customers - I've filled in the form anyway, we'll see what happens!

The fault originallly occurred on 31st March. I didn't notice until April 1st when I migrated from Enta/UKFSN to Goscomb who are an Enta L2TP isp (I think), hence the change in sig, which I forgot to update straight away...

BrianG

Exchange is Madingley, near Cambridge. (yes the one that won the Race to Infinity, so next year fingers crossed we might be rattling along slightly faster!)

Broadband Link � Statistics
DSL Down Up
Current Rate: 1536 kbs 832 kbs
Max Rate: 1616 kbs 976 kbs
Current Connection:
Current Noise Margin: 7.0 dB 10.0 dB
Current Attenuation: 48.1 dB 30.0 dB
Current Output Power: 15.3 dBm 11.9 dBm
ATM Cells Errors %
Transmit: 28705106 0 0
Receive: 304428564 0 0
IP Bytes Packets Errors %
Transmit: 685260537 6580192 0 0
Receive: 3433305812 9834868 0 0

Edited by bgriffiths (Mon 25-Apr-11 21:57:52)

Please let us know how you get on
Lot's of the TBB BT_Care interventions often don't seem to have the outcomes posted...

Just noticed my router reporting a Current Rate of 1532k, a Maximum Rate of >3300k and snr 17db.

So a quick re-sync and am now happily speeding along at 4512k/832k snr 7db. At this speed I'll need to watch the errors, but that's a fantastic result. With luck the IP profile will adjust soon...

Thanks to all for your help & specially to BT Care for (presumably) sorting it...

Brian G

Edited by bgriffiths (Tue 26-Apr-11 17:56:36)

and a final (hopefully) update:

This afternoon my IP Profile increased from 1258k to 3500k. Fairly high rate of crc errors, but doesn't seem to be affecting line stability. Even had a call from BT Support in Ireland following up on this thread.

BrianG