Advice Please -DSL drop out are driving me nuts

First post here, so please treat me as dumb as a gate post and we'll take it from there.

I have problems with my DSL connection dropping out randomly, especially evenings and also sometimes when the connection is stressed. Sometimes it drops when on a land line voice call. It might be once a day or it might be six times an hour for an entire evening.

I am on just under 3km of aluminium cable all the way back to the fastest (fibre enabled) exchange in my area. For part of the route it runs alongside a light railway and passes a substation. All the rest of the area has FTTC but we are not due to get a green box at the end of the road until sometime after hell freezes over.

My ISP (PlusNet) has been very supportive so far, but they are dependent on BT wholesale, who seem to have only one setting - send an engineer to plug in the box of tricks. They then say something like, "Line quality isn't great, I've seen no drop outs in the 20 mins I've been here (quelle surprise!!) and I'll refer it to the underground team" Tomorrow will be my 7th engineer visit. To my knowledge, or PlusNet's, the underground team have never been involved. On one visit a couple of engineers went back two manholes and re-did the jellies but that's it.

In terms of numbers: my downstream loop loss is 57.5 dB, my downstream power is 18 dBm, downstream SNR can be as low as 6dB but today is sitting at 14dB. My neighbour, who is with a different ISP but has the same problem is showing similar numbers. My modem keeps telling me the line is unstable and it's doing what it can to keep the show on the road.

In terms of actions so far: I'm on my third modem (an ASUS DSL-N66U). All internal extension cables have been disconnected and I'm working on a modem router and DECT phone plugged directly into the Openreach type 3 face plate they fitted; So whatever the problem is it's outside my home. Also, I've had a pair swap (from 9 ohms to a 1 ohm pair) and the outside box, incoming cable and jellies have been changed twice.

The only result of recent "adjustments" at the exchange is another drop in my speed. I had a best case of 5.7Mb and more recently 4Mb, but it's down to 2.8Mb since the last fiddling at Christmas. I'd settle for such poor speed if only the connection was stable.

So that's my tale of woe. My question is, what do I do next?

Cheers, Chunky




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Loop loss figures are useless without the matching connection speed figures and the SNR figure from the same time.

The DSL-N66U is loved by some but hated by others, so if it is three of those you've tried then time to do something different like the old 2Wire stalwarts that had a good reputation on long lines.

The noise source could be anywhere, from your central heating to the neighbours or some cases someones Sky TV box 200m area, i.e. there can be nothing wrong with the wiring but just lots of radio noise locally.

In reply to a post by WafferThinMint:

I am on just under 3km of aluminium cable all the way back to the fastest (fibre enabled) exchange in my area. For part of the route it runs alongside a light railway and passes a substation.

That may well be the reason ... which railway? Is it overhead or track powered? Do drop outs correspond to trains passing?

Thanks for the initial comments. Much appreciated.

To be a little more precise, I've not had 3 of the same modem. This is an ASUS, the previous was a D-Link I bought specially for the job and the first was the cheapo one that PlusNet supply but which has no diagnostics and wasn't able to either handle all the routing on my (rather large) domestic network or to allow me to run my Netgear wireless router as the DHCP host and just act as a modem connection for the router to sign in to.

The figures quoted are, obviously, all at the same point in time. Variation isn't great anyway but my worst case is an evening of 0.54Mb with SNR 12dB and loop loss 57.5 dB, as it always is from one day to the next. Download speed is in my OP. It has trended down as they have played about, particularly by winding up the SNR and on one occasion, trying to lock both up and down at 9dB. Throughout this, the line shows as unstable at my end and the ISP sees it as red.

The light railway is a tram network with overhead pantograph. Maybe there's a correlation with arcing as some trams pass one or more particular spots on the route but I have no way of knowing this and it certainly can't be a contributory factor when my modem has logged a DSL loss at 3am. I'm not going to be able to get the trams stopped, so I need a solution that accommodate the extraneous RFI.

I've been downloading multiple 1Gb dummy files from this site all night and all day and it has fallen over 3 times this afternoon.

My central heating is not an issue. It is located way over in the garage and three zone thermostats are high end Honeywell wireless, not the old two wire bi-metallic monsters or even the low grade wireless that British Gas fit. The motorised valves I specced are also high end, not the sort that click and buzz. The drop outs were happening in the summer when all the lot was turned off anyway.

I appreciate that it might be interference from someone else's Sky box or something similar but I'm not in a position to diagnose such variables let alone fix it. To my mind, if the line can't accommodate such noise then it isn't fit for purpose.

What I'm really searching for is advice on what to do next with my ISP and/or BT Openreach when they come tommorrow and I'd like some meaningful things to pose. If not that, then what is the general consensus about my numbers and whether they are acceptable?

Last time the guy spent two hours doing diagnostics at the socket before telling me it was all down to a partial short on my internal telephone wiring. It wasn't, because I disconnected it and ran continuity and resistance checks afterwards on the Cat 5e wiring I had done it in. It does not run past any power supplies and shows no picked up 50Hz hum on a scope. Individual end-to-end resistances on all 8 cores are the same within half an ohm and are consistent with the manufacturer specs for that length of cable. It's been disconnected for two weeks and, as per the original post I'm straight into the socket for all my connections.

Thoughts please.



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My usual advice under circumstances of intermittent faults would be to start logging 24x7.

Not sure what programme is best for your router.

Not sure what else I can be logging.

I have every event in my router log for about 2 months copied and pasted into a running Word file. So I know date and time of every failure event and also any wobbles where it just lost WAN connection but didn't fall over. I have the same for my neighbour who has similar issues and the two are side by side in 2-column mode. The times do not match up between his drops and mine.

I have my ISP's logging data that shows all the completed drops graphically by day and also instantaneous line data when they've run a diagnostic at their end about a dozen times so far.

I've also been running Ping Assist Pro since August, pinging a number of DNS addresses such as Google, my ISP's primary, secondary and tertiary DNS addresses, equipment on my network (to confirm no internal drops) and I'm even pinging a DNS in Australia. I have Ping charts coming out of my ears and could post them here if the forum allowed it. Without exception, pings to my server and CCTV cameras/recorder all come in at 0ms which confirms my network as fine. UK DNS addresses have a base line of 22-28ms, but I get spikes to 100-400ms, sometimes as high as 4000ms, which is the point at which it is about to fall over but just manages to recover. Some days no spikes, some days one or two, sometimes it's like a forest on the chart. I also get extended periods of 10 mins to several hours with a higher baseline of 100-200ms during which page loads are slow but they struggle through. If I spot such periods and look at the modem data there is no real change in SNR or downstream power.

As I type this, my last drop was 30 minutes ago. I'm experiencing UK pings in the range 53-4485ms for the 9 minutes since I turned on the logging PC this morning. I'm showing 2% of packets lost. At the time I'm downloading a total of 4 Gb of large test files from this site at an unremarkable speed nowhere near modem capacity or that indicated for the line. Aggregate speed is just under 300kB so I'm assuming the bottleneck is at the ThinkBroadband end.

Modem figures at this instant are no different to "normal"..................
SNR down / up 19.0 / 9.0dB
Line Attenuation down / up 57.5 / 31.5 dB
Data Rate 2944 / 768 kbps
Max Rate Down / Up 3008 / 900 kbps
Power 18.5 / 12.5dbm
CRC 0 / 0
I'm Annex A DSL with interleaving.

I'd welcome suggestions of any software that can continuously log anything more than what I already have that will be useful. But to be frank, I'm up to my ears in logging info and the BTO engineers don't seem too interested when I show them the prints.

How do I get my issue sorted?


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What everyone is getting at is the need to continuously monitor the SNR Margin, CRC errors, FEC errors - amongst others. Depending on your router - Routerstats would be a good place to start for monitoring.

Ping is almost entirely useless in this case - since all that reliably tells you is that the connection is up (or not). Variation simply tells you that your ISP is congested, you were using the link for something else at the time or the remote site was busy or a link between you and the remote site was busy.

As hunnymonster says, using ping or a speedtester only tells you that a problem may exist ... but doesn't help identify any causes. Any problem seen could be anywhere from your PC through to the far end, not just your DSL connection.

The logging you need to do is specific to the details of your DSL connection to the exchange - reading the connection details from your modem or modem/router. The starting point will be to monitor the values hunnymonster advises; by monitor we mean taking reading at least every minute, and produce graphs of the output.

RouterStats, or its sibling RouterStatsLite, might work with one of your modems.

I currently use programmes focussed on the FTTC modems - HG612-modem-stats and DSL-stats - but you might find they can help you with plain DSL too.

Here's a good summary, on a well-respected DSL site:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/routers/monitor_linestats.htm

Well I've spent an hour or three trying to get both RouterStats and RouterStats Lite working. The nearest available config data to my modem is DSL-N55U and I tried that one but nothing recorded. I also tried the full fat version and even worked out the TelNet option but my modem back heeled me saying that this client didn't have authority to do stuff. The modem shows RS as failed login attempts, even though name and password are correct. I'm sure it's brilliant if you've got a Netgear (I have, but it's a router, not a modem).

Before I spend even more time trying to get RS to work, will someone please tell me what benefit it's going to have? My modem has a traffic monitoring page where I can graph what's going up and down and a page of line info THAT NEVER CHANGES. Let me say that again, the numbers are always the same when I refresh, even when I force the line to fall over by downloading big files and watch the numbers. The speeds might vary a bit, but the line info is stable, so to speak.

Let's just say I spend half a day getting RS working and get a graph (that I can't post here on a text only site). What happens next?

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If the modem is falling over when downloading large files that usually points to something like a NAT table size or other issue in the router software, rather than the dsl component itself.

If the line is dropping and resyncing you should see this in the line stats when you refresh when the line is down, if not able to see that web page at all it suggests the modem/router has actually crashed and is going through a full reboot.

At the end of the day it may just be some random bad noise burst from something that is nothing to do with the line/modem/your home and not a lot can be done about it.

Random thought but have you tried connecting in ADSL2 mode rather than ADSL2+? If so, does that make any difference?

Otherwise, as others have said, proper logging is the way to go..

There is absolutely zero wrong with the modem router or its setup. There are no reboots going on other than the ones that I trigger. The ISP is happy to accept that all problems are beyond my front door and all I'm seeking is some guidance on what to do about it. I'm not the sort to just blame it on random aliens spiking noise and accept that there's nothing to be done.

So far, REIN has been tested for and ruled out, which inter alia eliminates the light railway as a source. I've had a "lift and switch" at the exchange, which had no benefit and yesterday we had a "TPM switch", whatever that is. It must have been a major activity because it took out my broadband service for 14 hours.

Can someone please get past the "what it is" and advise on the "how to get Openreach to bottom the problem" issue?

Many thanks.

In reply to a post by WafferThinMint:

SNR down / up 19.0 / 9.0dB
Line Attenuation down / up 57.5 / 31.5 dB
Data Rate 2944 / 768 kbps
Max Rate Down / Up 3008 / 900 kbps
Power 18.5 / 12.5dbm
CRC 0 / 0
I'm Annex A DSL with interleaving.

You SNR margin is very high. Looks like your modem is the problem.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

........You SNR margin is very high. Looks like your modem is the problem.

I don't know how many times I have to say this. It's my third modem. The last one was reporting similar numbers. There is nothing wrong with the modem. Besides which, High SNR margin is supposed to be good. It's low SNR that's a problem and <6dB is usually said to be in dodgy territory..


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Maybe it's the type of modem, have you tried other manufacturers? Different ones suit different lines.

In reply to a post by WafferThinMint:

As I type this, my last drop was 30 minutes ago. I'm experiencing UK pings in the range 53-4485ms for the 9 minutes since I turned on the logging PC this morning. I'm showing 2% of packets lost. At the time I'm downloading a total of 4 Gb of large test files from this site at an unremarkable speed nowhere near modem capacity or that indicated for the line. Aggregate speed is just under 300kB so I'm assuming the bottleneck is at the ThinkBroadband end.

Modem figures at this instant are no different to "normal"..................
SNR down / up 19.0 / 9.0dB
Line Attenuation down / up 57.5 / 31.5 dB
Data Rate 2944 / 768 kbps
Max Rate Down / Up 3008 / 900 kbps
Power 18.5 / 12.5dbm
CRC 0 / 0
I'm Annex A DSL with interleaving.

2944kbps connection speed gives an IP Profile of 2.597Mbps. A download speed of a reported 300kBps from thinkbroadband is 2400kbps so pretty well spot on. TBB is highly unlikely to have a bottleneck on that server.

To have a downstream SNRL of 19dB suggests it connected at 15dB or 18dB. Probably 15dB. But huge noise variance.

Despite what you say about the wiring on your premises you cannot rule out a local noise problem. Possibly in your house, possibly in your neighbours. Plus, "am on just under 3km of aluminium cable all the way back to the fastest (fibre enabled) exchange in my area. For part of the route it runs alongside a light railway and passes a substation" is somewhat suspicious. Particularly the light railway system. Trams? Users close to railways with overhead power cables for the trains, particularly close to level crossings so the lights and gates can also have an effect, have frequently in the past had very similar problems.

Please could you, (preferably during daylight hours), take the stats reading, then do a re-sync and take them again. Posting both sets. Also have a read of this page.

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 16-Jan-16 19:28:11)

Or simply the random noise bursts are infrequent enough to not be visible without someone monitoring everything 24/7 so never seen when during engineer visits but enough such that the DLM raised the target noise margin eons ago and things have never been stable enough since then for the DLM to reduce the margin. Could try asking the ISP to reset the target noise margin and see what happens.

Railways, aluminium cable runs all potential problem sources, and if it is burst noise from say sparking rail pickups not much Openreach can do.

It may be worth spending time finding out if the neighbours have similar issues, local engineers will often have a feel for this.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Maybe it's the type of modem, have you tried other manufacturers? Different ones suit different lines.

You are having a laugh, aren't you? As per previous posts, (but with a little more detail).... this modem is ASUS ............. previous one was a D-Link ............... before that was the rubbish, re-badged freebie Thomson clone supplied by the ISP that I only took in case I had problems and to ensure they couldn't blame it on my kit.

As for those who have had something useful to offer, please accept my thanks.

The monitoring front is a dead duck. I've been watching and refreshing the stats when I've forced a DSL drop by downloading big files and as I keep saying.... the numbers don't change. I understand that all of the supplementary logging programs have a sample interval longer than my monitoring has been.

As for neighbours - next door has the same issue (different ISP) and logs similar numbers. His drops do not coincide with mine. He's also had multiple modems, one a Zyxel, one a Netgear. Across the cul-de-sac they complain of episodes of dropped pages.

The TPM didn't work either. Drops continued throughout the weekend, including several times during the early hours when all but the modem was idle and even my server was on power saving shutdown.

As I understand it after a lot of research, a downstream attenuation of 60dB represents an incompetent line. Mine is 57.5dB and should be about 40dB for the line length. By the same token, my downstream power is ridiculous at 18dBm. The target range is +/- 5dB and up to 10-12db is the limit of acceptability. So with numbers like these trying to eliminate the possibility of a spike from the thermostat on my fridge (or someone else's) is a bit of a nonsense.

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In reply to a post by WafferThinMint:

As I understand it after a lot of research, a downstream attenuation of 60dB represents an incompetent line.

Not sure what you mean by an incompetent line but most lines which contain aluminium cable only have it for part of the local loop - not all of it.

The fact that your exchange has fibre even if you do not is irrelevant to your problem.

The reason why everyone is saying do some proper logging is that DLM does not only look at the position at resync-it constantly monitors the line and takes longer term issues into account. As such, there could be something locally affecting your SNR at specific times that makes DLM decide a higher figure is more stable. Your disconnecting/reconnecting is unlikey to help matters either - it will simply make DLM think there is something wrong.

Some modems are better on long lines than others - try one of those.

No, I'm not having a laugh, I'm trying to understand what the problem is so I can help you.
Although your speed is about right for the attenuation, the high noise margin indicates more speed is available.

40dB attenuation would be around 3km of telephone line, if you have had it shown from Openreach records this is the line length, then the issue is extra attenuation and possibly dodgy joints from old Al

What is very odd is that most modems when the connection drops and while in the process of syncing you have no IP address and also no ADSL statistics, then the ADSL stats come back after 15 - 30 seconds and then the IP layer after authentication will re-appear on the WAN interface.

The fact you are saying the router is not showing signs of a resync carries the indication the issue may not be DSL related.

If is this not seeing ADSL stats change that is the intriguing aspect as noise drops usually cause the SNR margin to change and when in the first stages of sync you have no adsl stats at all.

Well some of your remarks would justify us taking you at your word, "please treat me as dumb as a gate post and we'll take it from there". Others show you to be intelligent and trying hard to find out what is happening. Let's briefly review what has been said, and some facts.

I have problems with my DSL connection dropping out randomly, especially evenings and also sometimes when the connection is stressed. Sometimes it drops when on a land line voice call. It might be once a day or it might be six times an hour for an entire evening.

Three connected things there. It would be worth your while reading my Noise margin page as you sound as if you may be a little confused by some of the other sources you have read. The essential points for now are that (i) a high noise margin is generally a bad sign, and certainly is in your case; (ii) it is normal for noise margin to fall several dB as daylight fades, and rise during dawn; (iii) it is common for the noise margin to fall one or two dB when the phone is in use.

Besides which, High SNR margin is supposed to be good. It's low SNR that's a problem and <6dB is usually said to be in dodgy territory.

Simply wrong, on all counts. You will see why when you read my page linked to just now, and then this one about high noise margin.

I am on just under 3km of aluminium cable all the way back to the fastest (fibre enabled) exchange in my area.

a downstream attenuation of 60dB represents an incompetent line. Mine is 57.5dB and should be about 40dB for the line length

Aluminium cabling has much higher attenuation than copper. Attenuation is purely the result of line length, material and the circumference of the wires in the pair. It is a measure of the signal loss over its length. Nothing to do with it being "incompetent". Just a fact of life on xDSL.

What I'd like you to try again is getting RouterStatsLite going. I assume you downloaded if from this site - which is the author's. From the routers you have tried and failed with, clearly you have telnet enabled on your system else you wouldn't get failed logins, but there is a tick box in the RSL settings you may have missed. From memory it is called "Special login". What that does is set the router to accept telnet logins. See the "debug" command in the CLI login instructions on this page. That's just for info to you here and now, as we have no interest in CLI access. RS and RSL send that instruction at the start of their login sequence when you set special login, but manage to prevent it opening a blank window.

If you do get it running, please make sure you set the sampling interval to as short as possible. I think it is 7 seconds. That allows us to see rapid noise buildups, whereas a longer interval may not even show a loss of connection - just a state change. Set to save graphs including at closedown. As I remember it I used to manage to get about 1.5 hours per graph. 24/7. It also helps to adjust the sync and margin graphs' maxima and minima to give clearer detail.

Please could you also do as I requested in my previous post, regarding a daytime stats read > router reboot > new stats read. The point partly being we can see what change occurs, but mainly that the noise margin immediately after a router reboot tells us what setting DLM has for it. (Please post the full stats though, not just the noise margin).

If we can also get RSL running that could be a huge bonus. To lose connection when you have a high noise margin suggests a major problem.

One last thought, are you always using the filtered faceplate into the master socket? Have you tried different ones, or a dangly filter into the test socket instead? Filters can fail.

Have you or your neighbour got Sky TV?

I'm deeply indebted for all the input so far, particularly Roberto's and I've put some more time into it in the last couple of days. So in no particular order:

1. I'm still struggling to get anything from RouterStats-Lite. The nearest router to mine on the list is ASUS DSL N55U (mine is a 66) so I've tried that and confirmed that the stats page address is the same. I've also tried the other option for an owner setup and made sure I've put all the info in. In both cases it is definitely finding the modem, because if I leave it at the default 192.168.1.1 it says it can't find it, whereas when I set to 192.168.1.254 it seems happy. But no logging numbers at all, SNR is 0 and download is 3kb. Yes, I have pressed start and yes, Telnet is enabled.

I've run it with and also without the log page up on a separate screen just in case the modem doesn't like to have two clients at once.

Where am I going wrong?

2. Most of the numbers I've been quoting are from the router because they are easy to get instantaneously but I also have them provided by my ISP whenever they run a diagnostic and the numbers are pretty consistent between theirs and mine. The ISP has wound the SNRM up and down several times and as would be expected, lower numbers give me faster speed, higher numbers make it a bit more stable but I still get drops. I had one engineer who said I should ask my ISP to cap my speed at 2Mb and all will be well. They could only offer 0.5Mb as a firm cap but even this would be no use because it falls over in the middle of the night when there is no traffic and even my server is in power save mode.

3. I get two flavours of a failure, both of which have the same effect on my connection. The first is when the modem says "DSL is down, WAN link is down". It then jumps through all the hoops, "LCP can come up" etc. and sometimes it gets back immediately, sometimes it has multiple attempts. Eventually I get "DSL is up", it tries again and in the end I see "Wan Connection: WAN Link is up" and "WAN connection was restored" followed by a connection time which might be a couple of minutes or might be several hours.

The second flavour is when it just says "WAN Connection: Failed to connect with some issues" which leads to "modem hangup" and then on to "WAN Connection: WAN was restored". These are the ones that I am (perhaps wrongly) describing as a loss of sync. I believe my ISP logs them as session failures in the same way as a full blown DSL loss.

4. I'm rebooting the modem as little as I possibly can. In the last set of data my ISP sent me they logged 133 drops in 72 hours, 2 of which were at my end. One was a switch off to put a new socket on the wall elsewhere on the same ring main and the other was when the modem was so confused by about a dozen drops in 2 hours that I couldn't log in so a hard reboot was called for. As I type, my uptime is 7 days, 5 hours 18 minutes and my DSL connection time is 2 hours 19 minutes. A good day, but it will get worse when the sun goes down.

5. Yes, I know that having the fastest fibre exchange in the area is irrelevant. It is pretty galling though. Worse, because I have an EO line, when I get so-called superfast it will be with a cabinet outside the exchange and still the same bit of scraggy aluminium all the way? Is there a replacement policy?

6. Speaking of aluminium, I can only report what an engineer told me when he had all the drawings up on his laptop to show me the route. They were all snaps of good old fashioned hand drawings circa 1995, four years before the Supertram went in. If anyone has access to my local line drawings I'd jump at the chance to speak to you directly but in the mean time, let's assume its Al and does this make any difference to what BT Openreach SHOULD do about it?

7. I'm not alone! There was an engineer in an underground DP around the corner for 2 hours yesterday so someone slightly further downstream than me is probably getting hassle too.

8. My info about acceptable SNR, attenuation and power came from here http://www.screwloose.com.au/hosted-services/broadba... and here http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5862 plus half a dozen similar sites. Hence my belief that high SNR at the modem is good, 60dB attenuation is incompetent and that my downstream power is way, way outside the norm.

Therefore, I'm much obliged for Roberto's link, I've read it will continue to re-read it. The practical fact is that even with the SNR wound out to very good numbers by my ISP and speed dropped as a consequence the blimmin' line still continues to fall over in use and when idle.

9. Yes, I have Sky and so does at least one neighbour. Mine is quite some distance from the modem, fed by high grade PF 100 cable that I routed myself and fed from a professional grade 5x12 multiswitch and a proper quattro LNB on a big dish I erected. It's not one of those horrible Sky dishes with a cheap quad LNB and soggy crimped terminals just begging for a few inches of self amalgamating tape. I distribute its HDMI output to four locations around the house over Cat 6 cable completely separate to my network. Yes, I wondered what you're thinking as well so I turned the Sky box off for a day and it made not a blind bit of difference. By the way, The 3Mp and 5Mp IP CCTV cameras are also on a completely separate network which only connects to PCs using separate NICs.

(I know I said assume I'm as dumb as a post, but actually, I'm not behind the door, as my old man used to say. I just don't know enough to bottom this problem)

Summary

I'd love to get RSL working and provide some numbers if someone can guide me on the path to enlightenment. Meanwhile I'll try the trick of logging numbers then rebooting and re-logging as requested and report back after the weekend. First though, I'm going to speak to PlusNet to see whet their next move is.

And if anyone could humour me for a while and just assume that it's not local interference or my Sky box or my modem and that I'm not making all this up, is there any advice on what BT Openreach SHOULD be doing next, then what after that and finally to sort it?

p.s. It took me so long to type this it went down again. My DSL uptime is now 12 minutes.

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Oops, forgot one.

No, not always been the same faceplate. Started with a (rather expensive) 3rd party one I bought that would allow me to route pre-filtered DSL and voice wiring over Cat 5e 27 metres to my study, where the modem was supposed to sit beside my Level 2 smart switch and the house voice cabling also would connect and radiate. It was sitting on the original 1996 back box.

At the second engineer visit (September) they fitted the very latest BT Openreach Mk 3 faceplate with a brand new back box, new incoming cable and jellies.

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I notice you have an Asus 66, I have a 55 and found the modem part of the router to be rubbish on my line. If you tweaked the line it couldnt hold sync at all so I use the Asus as a wap and router and my billion 7800 as a dumb bridged modem.

Have you tried tweaking the snr margin on the asus or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

On point 8, if you are on a fixed speed service then a high SNR margin is good as lots of room for bursts of noise.

If on a rate adaptive service which you are, you have a choice, have a high SNR margin with lower sync speeds and probably less drop outs.

OR

A lower SNR margin and higher speeds when the line is working, but a risk of more drop outs.

The standard setting of 6dB for the modem to train to is fine for almost all lines, but some need to leave more room for noise bursts.

When a modem says DSL is down that is a sync failure, and without sync you also have an authentication failure, hence WAN link down messages.

If the WAN session drops with the DSL going down which can happen for reasons such as ISP dropping session, or the modem simply having a software error then that is a session drop. If you are having those suggests not that great a modem to be using.

The advice, Openreach has no legal obligation to provide you with working broadband at all, so you can report faults and get them to investigate and risk charges for no fault found visits and after a while they are within their rights to say nothing more we can do and give you a choice, keep service or leave. Put this another way, if you had to pay them per hour at plumbers rates how many hours would you invest in investigating this?

The three modems you've tried are not any of the ones that people rave about on long lines, the 2Wire models used to have a good reputation and may be still around on ebay.

I second Mr S's opinion that a 2wire hg2700 bought off ebay or a good modern broadcom based modem is really the way to go.

In reply to a post by Banger:

I notice you have an Asus 66, I have a 55 and found the modem part of the router to be rubbish on my line. If you tweaked the line it couldnt hold sync at all so I use the Asus as a wap and router and my billion 7800 as a dumb bridged modem.

Have you tried tweaking the snr margin on the asus or am I barking up the wrong tree here?

Happy to tweak it, currently it is +/- 5dB. Should I increment up or down and how far should I change the number?

In reply to a post by ian007jen:

I second Mr S's opinion that a 2wire hg2700 bought off ebay or a good modern broadcom based modem is really the way to go.

Yes, that was my original logic when I bought the D-Link and I planned to use it just as a dumb modem. But it wouldn't play nice with my Netgear DGN3700 router and I had to the D-Link to act as router and keep handling the addressing, DHCP, etc. It didn't have the flexibility for sort of IP things I wanted to do for segmentation of my network and the diagnostics were a bit pants, hence the ASIUS. If I could have found a good modem-only box with no aspirations to be a router I'd have bought it in a heartbeat.

I can see plenty of 2-Wire modems for sale for about a tenner, but they too appear to be modem/router with multiple ports (not sure if they are Gigabit). Will it definitely just be happy to play dumb modem plugged into the WAN port of a router, or would I be treading the same path again? Also, there seems to be a BT business modem with the same model number, is this just a badged clone?

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The good news is that my line appears completely stable for five consecutive days, which is getting close to the record for performance. SNR is 15dB and download is an acceptable 3.5Mb. I have agreed with the ISP to continue monitoring, but it may be that someone has finally brushed the dust off my connection at the exchange and I'm seeing a benefit.

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You could get an HG612 off eBay which although sold as an FTTC modem is in fact a fully-fledged xDSLx modem/router in bridge mode. The default configuration has G.DMT; ADSL2; ADSL2+; VDSL2 ticked, and they are easily unlocked to get line stats or tweak.

Feed your router WAN port from it as per FTTC, and in the unlocked version connect its LAN2 to another Ethernet port on your router to get full access all the time to stats and settings.

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 26-Jan-16 14:18:05)

Will it definitely just be happy to play dumb modem plugged into the WAN port of a router

Yes, just a checkbox and voila, bridge mode.

The 2 wire hg2700 is a bt business model and only 100M Ports I seem to remember.

The ASUS modem chipset/software is know for causing problems....but they are excellent routers

The 2wire 2700 has an excellent modem at the front end - good for long and noisy lines. Most in the UK are BT badged and need an easy minor tweak to unlock them. You need to ensure you get a 2700 not the later 2701.

The 2700 only has 100Mb ports - not an issue if you are to use it as a modem only.

Happy to tweak it, currently it is +/- 5dB. Should I increment up or down and how far should I change the number?

Experiment 1db at a time, I cant remember which is +/- as the asus chipset has a funny way I think it is reversed to what you would normally think.