ADSL to ADSL2+ Upgrade

Hi There,

I have got my broadband connection to ADSL2+ hopefully going live this coming wednesday. With the router plugged in, its delivering the following results:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 7264 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 21.0 db 13.5 db
Noise Margin 6.0 db 23.0 db

With the above figures, what sort of connection rates should i get when my line is activated on ADSL2+?

I appreciate that it will only a rough guide, but any input would be appreciated.

I'll suggest that you enter the data into Mr Saffron's ADSL & ADSL2+ Line Capability Estimator and see what it predicts.

Many thanks.

The checker shows:

Your ADSL2+ speeds are likely to be in the range 17900Kbps to 19750Kbps. With the line under performing with ADSL, it is likely this will hold back any speed increases the checker is suggesting for ADSL2+

Not sure what would be causing it to under perform, but if i can get anywhere near those figures then ill be more than happy.

Cheers

I've just entered your data and checked for myself. So the predicted modem sync speed is --

If your service provider uses ADSL2+ the maximum line speed likely is: 19750 kbps

So that is what you could expect to see when interrogating the modem, all being well. The other "guestimate" is the throughput speed --

With ADSL2+ the maximum IP throughput (result from a speedtest) is likely to be around: 17478

Note the absence of units for the latter figure!

The following block of advice suggests where to check for potential issues --

It would appear your line is under performing with regard to ADSL, this may be due to issues like the ring wire, unfiltered equipment and other factors. Ideally you would expect to see connection speeds of 7300Kbps or higher at your attenuation

Finally comes the prediction --

Your ADSL2+ speeds are likely to be in the range 17900Kbps to 19750Kbps. With the line under performing with ADSL, it is likely this will hold back any speed increases the checker is suggesting for ADSL2+.

As you are currently on an ADSL service with an upper sync limit of 8192 kbps DS, there does not seem to be too much wrong with your current situation. Your current sync speed of 7264 kbps DS appears to be quite respectable. Please connect your modem/router directly to the test socket at the NTE5/A and then promptly note the current statistics. If there is a significant difference between what you originally have shown and what is then obtained at the test socket, it is indicative of issues with your internal wiring (if any).

Agreed. I got 8128 sync on 30dB attenuation. That connection seems a little stunted. Perhaps a little investigative work will yield some results.

As requested, I have connected directly to the test socket, and got the following results:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 7328 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 21.0 db 13.0 db
Noise Margin 5.9 db 27.0 db

I have tried different Micro filters as well, and this is the best that i can get by getting the router to resync.

One of the problems i have, is that i am in a flat and where the phone connects, its via a 2 port Cat5 socket on the wall.... So there is a short cat5 cable between the wall socket to the BT Openreach box.

I have a spare one, which i have also tried and get the same results. I am thinking there is not much more i can do as i dont have any control over the rest of the wiring etc.

Let's take a look at what is returned when entering your latest statistics. Possible ADSL2+ sync speed --

If your service provider uses ADSL2+ the maximum line speed likely is: 19750 kbps

Possible throughput --

With ADSL2+ the maximum IP throughput (result from a speedtest) is likely to be around: 17478

And two comments --

The range of ADSL speeds expected at this attenuation are 7300Kbps to 7840Kbps
Your ADSL2+ speeds are likely to be in the range 17900Kbps to 19750Kbps

A quick inspection shows that you are now receiving all that your line can give, on ADSL. Given your circumstance, you have now done all that you can.

Let's hope that your forthcoming migration to ADSL2+ proceeds without any problems.

That tool's a bit touchy for the sake of 64 kbps, isn't it? Unstable equilibrium?

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 10-Jun-12 20:34:37)

Re-wire the extension, builders always do it wrong!

Make sure there is no ring wire and make sure one pair is used with only one wire connected for 2 and 5. Nothing else needs to be connected.

I had to re-wire my flat. I only connected extension 1, leaving the TV point and bedroom off, these were extension 2 and 3 in series from extension 1. Performance was massively improves, before the max was about 4Mbps after about 16Mbps!

Agreed. And quite likely.

I would only use it for approximations . . .

Ok,

If you can help a bit more, i have taken the sockets to bits and got a couple of pictures so show what i am up against!!

The first picture is of the socket where the Cat 5 fly lead plugs into:

Cat 5 Plug Wiring

The second one is where the Cat 5 cable connects to the BT Openreach box

BT Openreach Box Wiring

Just to put everything into perspective, this is what it looks like once its all assembled and working:

Assembled Plugs & BT Box

What do you make of this setup? Anything that can be done to make things better??


Much appreciated for any help!

Edited by deleted (Sun 10-Jun-12 22:37:11)

Hmm . . . A very, er, interesting set-up.

Just to confirm that I understand correctly, your first picture is the rear of the RJ45 socket that is labelled (what looks like) "D7/10A"?

I don't suppose you know from where that purple Cat5e cable originates? There must be a multi-pair Openreach service cable entering the building, which should be terminated at a distribution point. Hopefully that purple cable comes directly from the distribution point.

Perhaps you should ask your Management Company to show you where the Openreach service cable enters the building. (Remember to take your camera with you.)

I am surprised at what the installing Openreach engineer has done within your flat. It certainly is rather novel.

To be perfectly honest, overall, I do not think there is much else you can do.

I'm afraid getting to the distribution point is probably a no go.

The Openreach box is an after thought... Originally the Cat5 port should have had a small "dongle" to convert it to the standard BT telephone plug, but a cock up in the wiring prevented its use. The Openreach box was a "quick fix" to get service.

You know what, i think i am just going to leave things for the time being and see what happens when my line goes live and its pumping out ADSL2+. Doing anymore now is probably academic and results probably wont change.

A wise move, which I endorse. See what you get when transferred to the ADSL2+ service and then, if necessary, continue the investigations.

Perhaps you will update this thread with the new statistics, please, after the service has been upgraded?

I most certainly will - Activation is due sometime on Wednesday

Thank you.

As promised (and a lot sooner than i anticipated) my broadband has gone live. These are the figures after about 30mins of being live:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 10067 kbps 1123 kbps
Line Attenuation 23.5 db 10.3 db
Noise Margin 5.9 db 5.8 db


Now, from my understanding, although at the moment these figures do not look particularly good, the line is in "training" mode? Which i believe is for the next 10 days or so?? And it should steadily increase over this time if i have read right.

What do you guys reckon?

Not very promising

the NM is already as low as 6 db, the default level at which the previous estimates applied, and you are only getting 10 Meg, Would expect NM to be much higher at this stage.

Can you tell from your router whether you are on ADSL2+ and not just ADSL2? Perhaps its Telnet interface?

All bad.

I'm afraid I disagree with the earlier posters about your previous stats. On ADSL you should have been on either 8128kbps or 7616kbps, rock solid, and with a high noise margin. The figures you had suggested a considerable problem somewhere.The farina report did suggest its estimate based (mainly) on the attenuation could be screwed because of the low ADSL speed. It is.

As for speed increasing over the 10 days, you can forget that one. In the very early days of ADSL Max it might have been true, but that system died long ago. The main culprits in keeping the myth alive are BT Retail and Wholesale. All other ISPs using BT Wholesale just have to go along with it .

As 5km said, your wiring needs sorting out. If that's impossible, then you're stuck. At least you have a lot more than you had, and a decent upstream.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

the NM is already as low as 6 db, the default level at which the previous estimates applied, and you are only getting 10 Meg, Would expect NM to be much higher at this stage.

I don't agree. The noise margin is correct. It is the sync speed that is far too low, indicating a serious wiring issue.

Reverse sides of same coin

Agree OP has a wiring issue.

The noise margin is as per a DSLAM setting. The sync speed is negotiated based on a number of factors, as you well know.

The only way the noise margin gets high on a BT Wholesale system is by setting or by sync capping. (Barring the temporary effects of connection during a noise burst). None of these are evident. They are emphatically not two sides of the same coin.

Thanks for the comments guys.

Unfortunately, due to how the telephone line is delivered to me in my room, it leaves almost no chance of it being altered in anyway. Unless there is something the ISP can do (freeola) then what i am getting now seems like what i am getting now is what i am going to have to live with.

Ill call m ISP in the morning and see what they say, but i am not going to hold my breath for much improvement.

OK, how do you know NM was not set high enough to result in 10 Meg sync and has since drifted down to 6 dB due to excessive noise on line?

I know from my own experience that BTw do operate some sort of stabilisation period and successively set the NM target to 15, 12, 9, 6, 3 dB, usually with a re-sync once per day,

Because of the ADSL(1) stats posted earlier in conjunction with all the rest of the evidence we have seen.

Enough!

In reply to a post by akwilliams:

As promised (and a lot sooner than i anticipated) my broadband has gone live. These are the figures after about 30mins of being live:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 10067 kbps 1123 kbps
Line Attenuation 23.5 db 10.3 db
Noise Margin 5.9 db 5.8 db


Now, from my understanding, although at the moment these figures do not look particularly good, the line is in "training" mode? Which i believe is for the next 10 days or so?? And it should steadily increase over this time if i have read right.

What do you guys reckon?

Not very good.

I'll suggest powering off the modem/router overnight and then, immediately after you've powered it back on, note the statistics. A full hardware reset at your end and allowing the DSLAM to "recover" without any device sync'd with it may prove to be beneficial.

As for "training mode", I'll use the phrase "hog wash"!

Edited to add: Where are you located? (If you're in my home town, then the grumpy old black cat could possibly visit. )

Edited by burakkucat (Tue 12-Jun-12 05:52:39)

Well,

I powered off over night and connected again this morning... It resynced at 12079 which is quite a fair bit better.

Gave Freeola a quick call, they said just leave it alone for the next 10 days. Nothing more nothing less. The connection will do what it needs to do in order to give the best possible line speed.

Router rebooted about an hour after i turned it on and resynced at 11309.. I am now not going to fiddle with it and see what happens. As said, the structured cabling to my room is totally out of my control. Its CAT5 from the wall socket back to where it connects through the switchs and eventually to the BT distribution point.

@ burakkucat - I'm located in Corsham, Wiltshire!

Rgds
Aidi

I'm not sure about BT Wholesale but I know that Sky's DLM alters the ADSL power output which can affect synch speed. Can you pull that figure from the router?

Sync speed not very useful w/out NM.

And indeed power output!

@Aidi -- You're a bit too far away from me! (Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.)

When you next post any stats., please ensure that you show us the Sync speed, the SNRM and the power output. They are really only meaningful when considered all together.

Quick update on line stats at 1700hrs this afternoon:

According to the router it did a resync at 14:07hrs this afternoon.

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 11331 kbps 1115 kbps
Line Attenuation 23.5 db 10.3 db
Noise Margin 3.8 db 6.1 db

Trouble is Power levels not readily obtainable from Netgear router OP has; need to use Telnet i/f.

Ill do some digging around and see if i can telnet in somehow.

Just been trying with telnetEnable, but all i get left with is a command prompt window that goes black...

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Jun-12 18:27:03)

Which Netgear? Try this: http://www.kitz.co.uk/routers/netgeardg834_interleav...

Its a DGND 3700v1 router on 1.0.0.17 firmware.

Found and tried the link you gave mate, not working for me. When i run a telnet session all i get is blank Command Line window. Its doing something, just cant see what as it does not come back with any errors.

This guy seems to have got it to Telnet: http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/sky/t/4095589-re-sk...

Try typing 'adslctl info' into it.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Tue 12-Jun-12 20:02:35)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Trouble is Power levels not readily obtainable from Netgear router OP has; need to use Telnet i/f.

Yeah, which is a shame, as a sub-par power output can give a low synch with a low noise margin leaving users thinking there's no room for improvement.

Ok, got things working on the Telnet side of things.. Router is now synced at 14655Kbps. The telnet session shows the following info:


~ # adslctl info --show
adslctl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Last Retrain Reason: 8000
Last initialization procedure status: 0
Max: Upstream rate = 1112 Kbps, Downstream rate = 15736 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 1099 Kbps, Downstream rate = 14655 Kbps

Link Power State: L0
Mode: ADSL2+
TPS-TC: ATM Mode
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 0.4 6.1
Attn(dB): 24.0 10.3
Pwr(dBm): 0.0 12.1

ADSL2 framing
Bearer 0
MSGc: 52 12
B: 254 33
M: 1 1
T: 2 4
R: 0 0
S: 0.5557 0.9819
L: 3671 277
D: 1 1

Counters
Bearer 0
SF: 32490 29567
SFErr: 1878 0
RS: 0 2128183
RSCorr: 0 0
RSUnCorr: 0 0

Bearer 0
HEC: 800 0
OCD: 4 0
LCD: 4 0
Total Cells: 18089132 1331095
Data Cells: 917810 35706
Drop Cells: 0
Bit Errors: 45682 0

ES: 2009 0
SES: 298 0
UAS: 649 649
AS: 519

Bearer 0
INP: 0.00 0.00
INPRein: 0.00 0.00
delay: 0 0
PER: 16.11 17.67
OR: 28.79 8.14

Bitswap: 318/318 0/0

Well done!

In reply to a post by akwilliams:

SNR (dB): 0.4 6.1

Not good! EDIT: It's lost at least 14.6 dB since last resync.

In reply to a post by akwilliams:

Pwr(dBm): 0.0 12.1

I have always found Down Pwr reported zero since I was on WBC ADSL2+.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Wed 13-Jun-12 03:16:31)

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

I have always found Down Pwr reported zero since I was on WBC ADSL2+.

Some sort of power-saving mode maybe? Does it go up if you start a download?

Some strange goings on here still!!

By setting the SNR via the telnet session, my download speed dropped dramatically. Although synced at 14655Kbps, the max i could download at was around 500k. Did a hard reset on the router, let it resync (11355Kbps) and download speeds were back to about 1180Kbps SNR was reported at 4.4db and dropped to 4.2 when downloading.

Things are looking a bit better now. Found a good page on what parameters to set the SNR with:

Netgear 3700 - Setting Target SNR

I used 25 which dropped my SNR to 1.6. Nicely syncd and a good steady download speed of 1508kbps on the newsgroups.

I know my router will reset sometime soon and this sync speed will be lost, but at least i know i can get a fair amount more from the connection than where i was last night.

Edited by deleted (Wed 13-Jun-12 00:29:21)

It never moves!

In reply to a post by akwilliams:

Nicely syncd and a good steady download speed of 1508kbps on the newsgroups.

You mean K Bytes per sec (KBps)?

Sorry, that should have read KBps.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

It never moves!

Odd, ADSL2+ on Sky seems to report the correct power output in my Netgear.

So did Orange on LLU before it went WBC. So I put it down to a peculiarity of BTw WBC.