BT and DLM

Currently getting new electrics fitted in the kitchen, so the electrics over the next few days will be on and off until the work is fully done (hopefully will be finished by Thursday), but what sort of impact am I going to face with being on BT?


There is a bit of a back story to my question.

Up until the 11th May I've had a pretty stable connection (3 disconnections from the 1/1/19 to the 11/5/19) with the Openreach HG612, 53d/18u, 23ms ping, but then I decide to purchase a Vigor 130.

Right from the off speed decreased from 53d/18u to 38d/18u but the ping remained the same (23ms), as the Vigor 130 didn't come with a power adaptor (bought 2nd hand off ebay) I bought one from Wilko's.

On the 19/5 (a week of the Vigor 130 being connected and no disconnections), I found out that if I plugged something else in to the extension socked the Vigor 130 was plugged into, the Vigor 130 would reboot, so had several mini disconnections within a 10 minute period.

Swapped the power adaptor out for the BT home hub 5 one and it fixed that issue, however, I accidentally knocked the Vigor 130 and caused it to reboot again (not sure if the adaptor is just a bit too big for the Vigor 130 or the Vigor 130 has a dodgy connector).

For 3 days the speed and ping and it remained the same (38d/18u, 23ms) until the 21/5 when my speed then dropped to 33d/15u and ping increased to 31ms, for a week there had been no disconnections to try and restore the line to what it was before I swapped the HG612 for the Vigor 130, but feel that with the work that's going on, things will get worse.

If worried that DLM may intervene - when builders arrive in morning turn off modem and when everything done for the day turn it back on

I would extend that to say if you know the power is going to be going up and down then turn off all electrical devices at the plug and preferably unplug them. Spikes when power is going up and down could damage equipment even without the consideration of what happens with DLM on routers.

Well with the work complete did end up switching it all off when the work was on going and switched it back on when it was done and didn't have any further issues with the speed decreasing and ping increasing, just now having to wait to get everything back to what it was pre-vigor 130 with the vigor 130 plugged in

I bought a 130 to replace my old HG612. It wrecked my connection . I sent it back within a couple of weeks, but by then my line had been banded by the Openreach DLM.

Have you considered a small UPS just serving your modem and router? They will do mains conditioning as well as continuity duty. I have mine going to a standard 4-way socket strip on a short lead.

Since you will be still using the "wall wart" transformers with your modem and router you can get away with a "stepped sine" UPS rather than needing the more expensive "pure sine" models. I understand that APC are considered very good with CyberPower also well respected. You would probably want to look at the APC BackUPS range or the CyberPower equivalent.

This seems to have done the same, only reason i got it was I heard did well if you are on a ECI cabinet, which I am.

The only good news at the moment is that from my last post, my ping has returned to 21\23ms but my speed is still 33u\15d, far cry to what it was with the HG612 - 55d\18u

In fact I had a noisy telephone for sometime and it was never really cleared up even after an Open Reach visit. Even though they believed the noise was on the exchange side it didn't seem to effect the broadband (Product speed 80/20) all that much, or so I thought. Roll on several months possibly a year and I had OpenReach out again, this time a trainee and a "Tutor" team called. After I said I wasn't too bothered about having a new type "Nte5" they left an oscillator plugged in and went off to find the source of the noise.

The noise was due to my line being on an old aluminium cable to the exchange and luckily there were some newish copper spares. I should have checked my modem speed when the phone was dead as that of course was still working.

Anyway once the job was done and I suppose I had sort of convinced myself that the noise on the line wasn't effecting my router sync speed I noted it was sitting around 63Mb/s Down and 20Mb/s Up. I rebooted the router a few times and it reached 65Mb/s. I thought i should not reboot the router anymore times as per the advice on here and just thought thats all it would do for now.
Annoyingly it was syncing less now than it was with the noise on the line.

Anyway as a man defeated I thought I'd leave it for another day. However around 24hours later the Downward sync had shot up to 77+Mb/s. That's around the rate I got when i first had Fibre to the Cabinet.

Things learnt were rebooting your router a few times can make very little difference in your Sync speed. But the big surprise was , the so called Dynamic Line Manager can make a difference in a relatively short time.

PS Sorry for going around the houses a bit when it came to Router speeds, but I think I got there in the end.

Edited by Vorlon (Wed 05-Jun-19 13:52:32)

Just a bit of an update really.

Despite the issue with the electrics going on and off, that was sorted last weekend and no negative effect, my ping dropped back down to 21\23ms on Tuesday which was good news, however the speed didn't return.

Phoned BT and it was suggested that before they could look into the issue further but I needed to plug the HH6 in in order to run some tests, this was after one person, didn't do anything other than ran a single test which came back as a fail and ordered me a new HH6, no questions if I had the HH6 plugged in or not.

So plugged the old HH6 in and instantly was back up to full speed when I plug the laptop directly into the HH6, plugged the laptop into another modem that was connected to the HH6, and again got full speeds, plugged the gaming modem into the HH6 and ended up with the speeds of 35d/17u, even with bandwidth control turned off and it's only affecting the download speed and not the upload speed.

I'm guessing it always was at full speed, just the gaming modem I was using was causing the speed issue.