You know, I'm getting quite fed up with Andrews & Arnold. I thought they were supposed to be good�?

So, BT engineer came on Tuesday and determined that there was a problem underground which he wasn't trained to fix, so had to leave and send someone else out yesterday to work on this unbalanced cable problem. My line went down for a couple of hours, and when it returned my sync speed had improved by about 0.5Mb/s � so somewhat less than the 5Mb/s or thereabouts that I believe I'm missing, but a start nonetheless.

I was at work yesterday so today I tested my phone line again and� I can still hear the same radio station. So back I go to Andrews & Arnold to explain that there still seems to be a problem, and for the second time this year, they blame my handset!! Despite all of the evidence I supplied them with last week thanks to all the help here.

Additionally, they didn't e-mail me at all between last Friday and today � nothing to keep my updated after the fix was postponed for a day, nothing to respond to my question re. why this unbalanced line problem wasn't picked up when I raised a fault earlier this year.

Hmph.

This isn't the first time their e-mail support has been less than exemplary either (although sometimes it's good).

Getting rid of the unbalanced cable fault will help with the noise cancellation properties of the pair. The magical properties of twisted pair is being undone by the imbalance.

Agreed, raise the pairs A/C balance.

The pass mark for a PQ test is 55db, but I think 60 or above is better for this kind of thing, problem is the value of the earth the tester uses is an unknown.

Ah yes, thanks, that makes perfect sense.

Latest update for those who're interested: Andrews & Arnold are saying there is no service-affecting fault so are currently unwilling to do anything.

HI Be3G, I believe this fault is with our escalations team, I'll see what's going on with it and will get an update to you. I'd offer to send a second corded phone yo test with, but postage will cost as much as buying one

Arrgghh my hideout in the General Broadband Chatter forum here has been rumbled, you've found me!

Just kidding. Thanks Andrew.

In reply to a post by andrewhearn:

HI Be3G, I believe this fault is with our escalations team, I'll see what's going on with it and will get an update to you. I'd offer to send a second corded phone yo test with, but postage will cost as much as buying one

So you will credit his account with the purchase price and a goodwill gesture for the inconvenience? .

(Sorry Andrew, but it was an irresistible open goal ).

Because I know you're aaaalll on tenterhooks�

My line has been fixed! Sort of.

Slightly begrudgingly it seemed, A&A pushed through a new PSTN fault to Openreach last week after finding my thread here. I wasn't expecting much to come from this, as it seemed safe to assume I'd have the same experience as mentioned in my OP after the first visit a few months ago. I was even starting to doubt myself for getting on A&A's nerves but a couple of days ago my broadband inexplicably dropped for six minutes, which proved that after the recent work to fix the unbalanced cable the line still wasn't operating perfectly, with or without the geriatric corded phone.

So the Openreach guy arrived today and this time, unlike the previous visit, did believe me when I said there was a problem. He was probably about twice the age of the previous engineer, and sounded like he had a fair bit of experience under his belt. He immediately suggested one of the filters that've been talked about in this thread before; I was a bit apprehensive of negative impacts on my ADSL signal, but I figured it was best to let Openreach do what they want to do. So he put it in in place of my old GPO box and voila: no more audio on the line!

After reconnecting the router I find, much to my interest, that my speed is� the same. So it's definitely not had an adverse effect (e.g. by filtering out useful ADSL signals in the same range as unuseful radio ones), but there's also no indication that it's fixed the ADSL side of the equation. Sure, I can live with my speeds not improving, but the fact they haven't makes me suspicious that the ADSL signal stiff suffers from interference and may therefore still be liable to drop.

So I guess I'm just going to have to keep monitoring the line, wait for any disconnections, and then report an ADSL fault in future if I do get any. I'm very pleased though that the PSTN side has been fixed now, so thanks everyone for your help and for giving me the confidence to keep pushing my case with A&A.

Whilst your speed hasn't improved are you able to see if the SNR has increased? It could be the SNR has gone up but that DLM is now holding your line back rather than a fault.

Sadly the SNR and sync speed are almost exactly the same as they were before the engineer's visit today, so I don't think there's much to look forward to in that respect!