Message from Simon re. WBC

"BT have announced a series of WBC "Capacity Upgrades" that are due to be rolled-out over the course of the weekend, to be completed by 6pm on Monday.

They say that they have recently "uncovered" an issue with the capacity management process which has caused parts of the network to be "under-dimensioned" [that's a new one!]

These upgrades "should cause no disruption to service"."

Original at:

http://www.idnetters.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=15...

I am wondering if that is why I am having problems. I have been with IDNET for 5 years. Started with ADSL, went to ADSL2 without a hitch. In 5 years I had never spoken to IDNET support because I never had to, everything working just great. Upgraded to ADSL2+ and it looks like the wheels are falling off.

The line I am on is fairly long so I know that (download) speeds would not improve much but it would increase the upload speed (which it has). Also the bandwidth allowances increase.

I have been upgraded for just over a month and the download speeds have dropped from a solid 4-5Mb/s to a 2-2.5Mb/s. I now have had 2 instances of Openreach profiles being reduce to 250Kb/s which involves support calls and having to wait 48 hours for Openreach / IDNET to sort their service out.

I really wish I had not taken the upgrade as there seems to be some serious reliability issues!

Also does not help that you can only speak to IDNET during working hours which means that Jo Public that still have jobs in this country are at work when you speak to the.


Rant over!

You can arrange for an out of hours support call. WBC is, in my experience, a bit less stable than Max, simply because it uses higher frequencies. A 250k profile indicates a re-sync at a very low speed. This is not an IDNet issue, but purely down to the wiring between your exchange and the router. Without any line stats, I can't offer you any specific advice, but the first thing to do is to make sure nothing under your control, ie after the test socket, is generating noise.

Hi Rik,

I think you are right. I dont think the problem is IDNET but this environment has been running fine for 5 years. Upgrade to ADSL2+ and now I have an environment that I cant relie on at all. The data rate at 2640 is about right but the BT profile is throttling back to 250Kb/s

Here are my router states (They look ok to me)

Recieve are the first numbers, Send are the second numbers
Max. DSLAM data rate kBit/s 6656 1280
Min. DSLAM data rate kBit/s 3328 32
Attainable data rate kBit/s 2908 920
Current data rate kBit/s 2640 919

Latency 0 ms fast
Bit swap on off
Seamless Rate Adaption off off
Impulse Noise Protection 0.0 0.0
L2 Power mode NA - -

Signal-to-noise ratio dB 8 7
Line attenuation dB 44 87

Edited by deleted (Sat 15-Aug-09 18:51:23)

Sorry to be late getting back to you, we've had a few problems this morning.

You may be one of those affected by BT's 'under-dimensioning' (no, we don't know what it means either!). See how things are on Tuesday.

Looks like under dimensoning fixes and a change of router have done the trick.

I have the fastest download speed I have ever had.



Mike.

That's good, Mike. If anyone is affected by the problem and hasn't noticed an improvement, the advice is to power off the router for five minutes and then re-connect.

In reply to a post by rikbean:

in my experience, a bit less stable than Max, simply because it uses higher frequencies. A 250k profile indicates a re-sync at a very low speed. This is not an IDNet issue, but purely down to the wiring between your exchange and the router.

It's less stable than Max but you get a better deal.

Max has no off-peak allowance, I pay £25 on Max and get 30GB bandwidth, whereas ADSL2+ user gets 30GB plus 60GB off peak for the same price.

It is rather annoying because I have blown my cap and 50% of my usage is off peak.

I have the choice of unstable ADSL2+ or paying mega bucks in extra bandwidth.

Edited by dasnk (Thu 20-Aug-09 18:02:24)

To put that remark in context, I re-sync every 3 days on WBC, whereas it was every 30 o Max. However, I generally re-sync at the same speed, or slightly higher, so my profile has been stable.

There seems to be generally more complaints with WBC system than with max though, So it something you have to factor in to your decision, if you are currently nice and stable on max

Agreed, but I have gained .5M from it on a 57db line, even 1M at times. WBC is a bit more 'router sensitive' too, so that will influence results.