Is This REIN & Can it Just Clear-Up?

For months my ADSL2+ line is usually stable with steady stats and stays connected for weeks, even when the phone is in use.

Over the previous 3 days, whenever I make a call, even to Quiet Line Test, the NM fluctuates wildly and the line discons & re-syncs. Quiet Line Test is fairly silent with occasional hisses.

Today the line is back to normal and I can make calls w/out the ADSL being affected at all. The Quiet Line Test is totally silent.

What is happening? Is this REIN and does it just go away w/out me doing anything or getting an eng in?

Sounds more like the onset of an HR fault. REIN doesn't usually show itself by the sync dropping when the phone is used.
The 'hiss' is a tell tale sign in my book.

HR is what? Is it internal or external to me? Who can fix it?

Does it just go away as it did for me? Line is fine at the mo'.

High Resistance

Usually at a joint somewhere, maybe some water ingress causing problems. If water it may go away, but they have a tendency to get worse over a number of years and then the voice breaks, and ADSL keeps getting worse

ISP can request tests that specifically look for this type of fault without sending an engineer out

High Resistance. External to you. Gradually gets worse.

Hard to trace when not happening, but in the end you get a complete failure of phone, broadband or both.

So it's the responsibility of the voice provider, i.e. BT, to investigate and fix, and should be reported as a line fault?

Difficult unless you have a fairly reliably reproducable noise on the quiet line test. We only go for voice callout for broadband problems when that is the case.

What's this hiss? There is a tiny background one if your ears are good enough, but there shouldn't be something coming and going. Don't forget to try the test with just a corded phone into the test socket.

Definitely sounds like a HR like everyones said. You can raise it as voice (if the lines fuzzy etc) otherwise raise it as BB issue.

The phone might be knocking the BB out - but if the phones working fine it shouldn't be logged as voice fault.
The actual fault is with the broadband being knocked out. Hence BB fault not voice

Shouldn't be chargeable provided you're in the master socket and the like.

EDIT: Have you tried another filter as often these being faulty can cause issues like this.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Tue 16-Oct-12 23:45:29)

Out of interest, would such a fault affect FTTC to the same extent as ADSL, in view of it travels over copper only between me and cab and does not use my copper line between exchange and cab (where, as I understand it, such fault may possibly be located)?

Don't know sorry.

I had a gradually worsening fault, to the point where in the end it became quite a nuisance, of the broadband continually losing and regaining sync for hours at a time once it started doing it. (Fortunately on O2 LLU so no long-term effects). By continually, I mean the re-sync time of ~20 seconds was closing matched by the 20-30 seconds before it dropped out again.

The cure was to run the quiet line test for several minutes. That stopped the disconnections almost immediately, but had to be kept going for a while. Immediate termination of the test let the problem come back straight away. By gradually worsening, I mean it started happening every week or so, and ended up as several days a week.

My gut feeling was it was E-side, with the views of several OR engineers hunting for usable pairs at my cabinet supporting that. I'd already had a pair swap due to the phone line becoming very noisy, and the new pair was 700Mbps slower than the first one. I didn't want another swap, though it was beginning to look inevitable.

This was a major (but risky) factor in my move to FTTC, thus eliminating the e-side for broadband. A couple of the engineers posting on these forums reckoned that if it was E-side the FTTC would be insulated from it. Which it is, I'm pleased to say. The cost rise from £5.nn to £23.nn, plus ~£90 setup and a £26 router was a bit of a choker but I don't regret it. Nor do I regret my move a year later to PN, at much lower cost. £16.49pm - though I have now upgraded.

One thing that I tried when I had a similar problem was: connect the router to the test socket either with a known good filter or directly and, without any telephone equipment connected, made a incoming call using a mobile to my landline number. With RouterStatsLite running the incoming call ring voltage (?) caused a sudden dip on the graph to 0dB SNRM and the DSL to drop in my case.

The router would immediately resync after the noise event had ceased - problem was I had a devil of a job convincing my ISP (PN at that time) that there was an external line fault because they saw no loss of the PPP session at their end...

Well, I was on the phone for 75 mins trying to transfer an ISA to an oversubscribed bank and the line didn't drop once, stats were static and there were no snap, crackle or pops.

Could there be some other cause than this HR fault for my original problem, like someone messing about with some board in exchange or cab?