Connection / Line Speed Woes

Since I switched to Sky Broadband around 6 months ago up until last Monday, I was a happy camper - stable connection at usually ~2800kpbs downstream / 768kbps up (MAX user), and no problems. Then, on Monday, he connection became unstable - when it was up it would stay up for only around 15-20mins, and could be sitting for a few hours trying to reconnect again before being able to do so.

Contacted Sky tech support to report this, ran through the usual 1st-line script fixes (filters / wiring / run it off the test socket), no joy, so they raised it to their 2nd/3rd line last night. Sometime overnight I got a stable connection again - although Sky now seem to have limited me to a meager 640kbps down / 96kbps up. Not happy about this, as I know my line is capable of better speeds than that.

I'm going to contact Sky again tomorrow to try and get this sorted, but has anyone had similar problems who can point me how best to push it with them?

For the record, line length is just over 4km, attenuation 56dB, noise margin 15dB. No changes made to in-house wiring before the problems began.

This is a normal problem for this time of year as winter sets in the nights get longer and the weather turns , people lines that worked fine in the spring and summer become unstable and lose speed and stability .
Your on a longish line , and your 15db SNR sayz its a noisy line , and its a real shame that sky only offer ADSL2+ as i feel you would be better with normal ADSL or even ADSL2 with the stronger tones .

Do you have noise on the line when making telephone calls ?

Edited by deleted (Sun 09-Nov-08 02:11:40)

Try removing the ring wire (wire 3) on all your phone sockets, and see if the SNR improves at night.

I have a BT iPlate on the master socket, which I believe does the same job as removing the ring wire. Wonderful gadgets.

Not quite as good as a filtered faceplate, though

Incidentally, no need to wait till tomorrow to phone Sky - they're open 24/7/365

zebedeee

The OP states that everything has been OK for 6 months why should things change suddenly? Surely the wiring has not changed all of a sudden?

Maybe you are giving poor advice that you accused me of giving in an earlier thread?

Edited by monaltrie (Sun 09-Nov-08 18:55:36)

Quite simple - he quite possibly has run out of SNR margin, because of the lack of sunlight on the troposphere, because of the shortening days. I suppose he could take your advice, and wait for 10 days for a miracle ?

>Maybe you are giving poor advice that you accused me of giving in an earlier thread?

You've never listened to an AM radio before and after dark? Heard all the foreign stations interfering with the station you want to listen to?

ADSL is similar.

i do not have the technical knowledge of others on this forum but my understanding is that although ADSL2+ does drop off quickly for speed based on distance it will only go as slow as what ADSL 1 would have went (ie no slower on a long line for ADSL1 or 2) and for reference, i am on sky max LLU and only connect on ADSL1 they have not put me onto 2 or 2+, and i suspect that the op is also on version 1 as well due to long lines - i thought they only put people on 2+ who have a good chance of hitting double figures for the download
my stats up / down
speed 3072 kbps 416 kbps
atten. 59.0 db 31.5 db
noise 14.3 db 13.0 db

Essentially that's correct. The higher frequencies of ADSL2+ degrade a lot more with distance than the lower tones of plain vanilla ADSL, so once you get to the point where you would get about 7000kbps with ADSL, you won't get much more with ADSL2+.