In reply to a post by RossMcG:

so the telephone tends to be like an unliked relative sitting in the corner gathering dust.

You may not need your phone line for voice but if it is providing sub-standard voice, whether you use it or not, then it will certainly be degrading your BB.

If you ever need to diagnose BB faults, always have a cheap corded phone handy, even if you never call from it, and do the QLT at the 1st opportunity, Any noise report to your voice provider, never mentioning BB.

The quiet line test passed , also booted me off the internet while running it lol.

Openreach engineer first said my line was almost 8km then said it was 3km as the crow flies it is 2.6km. So sounds like my line is doing loop'de'loops and a tour of the town.

I was given this code from one of the open reach engineers, apparently this is the line I am on: dp1783

Openreach told me in writing that there are no junctions in the line that is a straight line to the exchange (I still have that email) now I find that hard to believe, much like the last engineer telling me he replaced the entire line :/

Makes no sense to me

@ XRaySpeX - I always keep my corded phone next to the socket, it was fairly cheap (about £5) but at least it works and cant be blamed like the cordless phones.

The frustrating thing is when the engineers come everything is said to be perfect yet then it gets to night time and it starts playing up again. despite all the visits I have never had a REINN (i think thats the name) engineer out. I had an incling perhaps it was electrical at one point but just had a new kitchen fitted and all appliances are brand new and the electrics were all tested, although that may mean nothing

Electrician tests are just safety based.

Turn off everything at fuseboard apart from what is needed for broadband do things improve?

I recently had a new kitchen fitted and a lot of work done throughout the house. For a couple of days we had no internal power but the workmen allowed me to use their generator thing to keep the broadband running so I could watch netflix on the laptops. It worked fine for a while then as ever there were multiple drop outs. Ordinarily I would say they could be caused due to the powertools etc that were being used but some happened when the men were on their lunch break.

I explained all that to the openreach engineer and asked if perhaps a neighbours system is causing the drop outs (I read central heating systems can cause REINN), he said I had no chance of getting a REINN engineer and I should just "live with it".

I was also told by another engineer if I persist they will only move me to another line, which will probably be slower.

Seems to be really "hit or miss" with engineers attitudes, one thing is abundantly clear, they do not like working weekends lol.

I have to say though most have been courious, must be frustrating for them too.

I had a look on this checker: http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/fibre/checker.php

I was wondering if anyone could answer a couple of questions. Here is the results (edited to tidy up as in table format, postcode is KA13TQ):

This postcode has some Exchange Only lines
This means there is currently no cabinet to run FTTC from.
Openreach may deploy FTTC/P in the future to this area. 47% M_A

This postcode has some Exchange Only lines
This means there is currently no cabinet to run FTTC from.
Openreach may deploy FTTC/P in the future to this area. 47% M_D

FTTC 5% 15.94 8b P34
.....................

I am wondering why the top 2 are listed as Cabinets "M_A" & "M_D", what does that mean in English?

Also if 5% of a postcode area is connected to a cabinet then surely it cant be that difficult to re route a few lines?

Perhaps I am just being nieve.

M_A indicates the cable ID in the exchange.
Re routing E/O lines into cabinets is not easily done as the main cables are sealed and pressurised . If trying to divert into existing cabinet then that may not be ocated near the cable and just trying divert the odd pair would not be worth while from a business perspective.
If going to go done the cabinet route then may make more sense to do several hundred lines at once and put in a whole new PCP or go the FTTP route.

I would guess that there is probably a maximum of a hundred households attached to my postcode (complete guess of course). I understand that it would not be financialy viable to do that work when the uptake could be less than 1/3 of homes ordering fibre. I personally believe there would be a much higher uptake due to the current speeds of 1 - 3mb. Alas that would never be considered I would fear.

I am learning quite a bit from this conversation which is good, every day is a school day after all

Does anyone think there could be any truth in the engineer informing me that he replaced the entire line? From pole to house had previously been replaced.

The guy also informed me that he told the ISP that they should consider replacing my router, which would be my fourth router. The annoying thing is how useless sky routers are.

Replaced line - unlikely. Most likely switched you to a spare pair, so not new copper but an existing line that was not used by anyone else.

Lines live in bundles so changing one physically is not possible, they run a new 50 or 100 pair cable and then spend a morning swapping people around.

Many people find the Sky routers very stable and generally sync well, but noise can affect different lines differently.

Whatever he replaced made it slightly worse, typical

I have the same gripe as most people do with sky routers, they are extremly slow with file transfers. Even with a decent power line adapter set up im lucky to get over 6MB/s transfer rate, why they never made the new ones GB is beyond me. If i am streaming a full 1080p movie it can get choppy (I have 2 x NAS set ups)

I think the worse thing is the DLM and the constant drop of connection and slow down.

Looks like I have no chance of decent broadband

6MB/sec as in 48 Mbps, so I presume you are talking about the WiFi aspect, then yes they are not the fastest wifi devices, but that can be solved with additional wireless access points, and additional gigabit switch to keep more LAN traffic away from the Sky Hub.

Yes the Sky Hub is not the best multi-media data centre type device, but various commercial options available.