Does that mean I have to call a BT engineer to check and fix my wiring?

Also, if I switch to Virgin or TalkTalk and call their engineer, do they have cheaper fee or I have to pay the same £200 in all providers?

I too live in Brighton Marina and, after rearranging the internal phone wiring to use the master socket correctly, I'm now getting in excess of 5 Mbps downstream sync speed and the full (limited) upstream speed of 888kbps. I also had instability and this has been cured by getting Openreach to change the pair back to Kemptown exchange and they also corrected a dry joint in the "cabinet" (which is actually a small room by the Zizzi restaurant).

Note that, whoever your ISP is, Openreach "own" the copper wire between Victory Mews and Kemptown exchange and they are likely to charge if the fault turns out to be only a problem with your internal wiring.

Let me know if you'd like me to pop over and advise.

No idea what the device is in picture Lead.jpg not a standard BT shape and if that massive coil of white cable is phone cable going into and NOTHING coming out, then probably not helping. Lumps of phone cable and unshielded speaker cables hate being bundled up with lots of mains stuff.

To be honest, either its someone like me visiting, or getting who ever you pay phone rental to arrange Openreach to visit, at best they are going to increase your speed to 3.5 to 4Meg but that is not guaranteed.

I will repeat what I've said before, you MUST find the wire as it comes into the property, and the first socket that reaches, and disconnect every other socket and test from there. Then when that is good you can consider reconnecting any other sockets you need.

The aerial socket which is what this joint box is, we need to see inside. Putting a junction for a phone cable in a box like that is very non-standard.

The two wires used for each socket at the dual socket, confirms to me that this is most likely your master socket, this socket will generate the signal on pin 3 itself. But am 99% convinced you have a star wiring configuration, from the wide amount of types of cable used.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Dunno, but from the rest of this thread it seems likely that it is your wiring that is the issue as I pointed out before.

I had errored seconds easily every 4 seconds with 3 years on adsl (even under SRA). In my case it probably was not wiring given I was hooked up directly to the test socket. It only dropped to much lower error rates when I had extremely high noise margins 12db+.

So I guess its possible some lines will just naturally have high error rates. My line of course was overhead pole, in a city and 4km long.

What do I have to say to BT about this so they understand me and send an engineer out to check it? And as an alternative, can you guys pop in here if needed to check it yourself?

Chrysalis, I can't say it's not the wiring because mine is not connected to a test socket. If it was, then we could say that it's just my telephone line and we can't do anything about it... But 1.9 mbps at non-peak times and that stats is so bad! I'm sure my line is capable of alot more than this, if everything with the wiring stuff gets fixed.

Stats are below average but not abysmall.

What you say to BT, can I have a NTE5 master socket fitted, i.e. regularisation of wiring, should be £25+VAT, but that would leave you with just one working socket, generally near to where the wiring enters the property.

If you wanted them to connect up the extension wiring, that would mean the £200 fee is more likely.

The issue with anyone from here doing things, is that your wiring is so unclear its not sure if this would be a ten minute job, or a full morning of rewiring to get sockets working where you want them. Telephone directory will have telephone engineers advertising, and they will quote you, make sure they understand about ADSL to avoid them making things worse, plus would have the public liability insurance.

Do you think a third party engineer will work for this? I have found "Geoff Lamb" (phoneextension.co.uk) as a ex-BT engineer. Does anyone have experiences with him or is there anyone else that you recommend so I can avoid paying £200 to BT?

And when I call them for a quote, shall I say my ADSL has high CRC/ES or should I just say my wiring is not right/strange(!) ?

And also, for brighton marina, wich ISP do you guys prefer?

I heard that Sky provides broadband by BT so it's the same as BT, wich one is better for my area? Virgin? Sky? TalkTalk? for a better customer service & speed after my wiring is checked & fixed?

And I have also read that Virgin has issues with Brighton especially BN2 postcodes (that is part of our postcode here too). Is that correct?

Edited by deleted (Thu 15-Sep-11 11:25:49)

Sky is over a BT phone line, but is very different to BT Total broadband

Virgin cable broadband services offer the fastest speeds, issues are likely down to congestion, i.e. brighton being a young single persons town and university town.

Not heard of Geoff before, as outside my area.

In terms he is used to, you probably have a star wire configuration across 3 floors, and would like it tidied up so the broadband is filtered at the master socket and other extensions are pre-filtered. The best setup you can have really.

The cost will depend on how many sockets, you want to work, and where you want the ADSL working socket to be.

The work may or may not fix the CRC errors, it may or may not improve the actual connection speed. All we can say is for 53dB attenuation you are connecting at below average speed, and the wiring looks suspect.