Deteriorating performance - how to proceed?

Recently my Sky BB performance has been dropping way off. I used to get 5+ MBPS down and 700+ KBPS upload, now I'm showing this:

Data Rate(Kbps)
2528 128
Noise margin (dB)
7.4 7.0
Output power (dBm)
11.6 18.4
Attenuation (dB)
50.0 29.0

I started with Sky on Max, now I'm on Mid for cost reasons.

If I do a quiet line test from the test socket, sometimes it's great, clear. Some other times it's noisy as hell. I phoned BT faults one time and was told it'd be 60 quid or something and she couldn't see a fault on her system. Even though I had to say 'what' , 'pardon' all the time as the line was so bad I couldn't hear the 151 person. Sure as eggs are eggs though, if openreach look at the line, it will be fine at the time. Then I'll presumably get the BT 'fine' .

That's one problem,

Second problem is, I'm using a Belkin MIMO router at the moment as the Sky one had dreadful WiFi coverage in my house. Will Sky look at a line issue with a third party router on the line? I could plug my Sky one back into the line but that brings other problems - I have custom firmware in there, to allow SNR target setting for stability (which I did when the line quality issues started surfacing about a year ago). Will they be able to tell (or care) that this has been done?

How are Sky at sorting line quality issues? What's the next step. Really hoping to avoid openreach charges here!

Thanks for reading.

Edited by garycowell (Mon 18-May-09 12:33:26)

Don't report the fault as an ADSL problem - report it direct to BT as a line problem (assuming that's who you rent the line from). When I phoned BT and they said that there wasn't a fault on my line, I asked them if they would prefer that I report it to the chairman's office instead ? They said no, and sent an engineer (with the usual warnings that I would pay if they found nothing wrong). The engineer found that a neighbour's trees had worn through an overground cable further up the road, and he fixed it.

As for your second query - Sky won't talk to you about technical problems unless you have the Sky-supplied router connected to your line. They may be able to see if the software is not the right one, but I can't say for sure.

Edited by deleted (Mon 18-May-09 12:43:59)

I'm going to connect up the Sky router back tonight to the unfiltered master socket and get some numbers out of it. Might even attempt to re-flash with the base firmware. I'll take it up with BT after that. Thanks.

I had awful ADSL problems and noise on the voice on my line. I am with Sky Talk, and they were brilliant at repeatedly calling Openreach out (I just had to listen to the yadda yadda about the call potentially being chargeable).

At the 3rd or 4th visit I finally got an Openreach tech who didnt try to blame the kit in the cupboard (even though the deafening crackle was evident even with a phone plugged into the test socket in the NTE - when it showed up). This one also bothered to check in the street cab (not just up the pole) and told me my pair was a lovely shade of green in the connector block. And the street cab was flagged for a total rebuild. Took him most of the afternoon to identify a good pair back to the exchange and swap me onto it. Since then (October '07 IIRC) it's all been absolutley peachy. So glad I was with Sky Talk who were happy to keep kicking Openreach. Black marks to the Openreach tech who said he'd check the street cab out and obviously didn't. Or id'd the wrong pair in it....

As someone else advised, if there's obvious noise on the speech path, get that fixed and don't mention the ADSL problems.

Phoned 151 tonight, talked to the lady through a hail of whines, pops and static. No problem with the line said she. I asked her if she could hear the nose. Yes, she could. Still no problem with the line though. This was on a corded handset at the test socket. I did just report it to BT as a voice fault.

Before that, I'd checked that removing the faceplate disconnected the housebuilder installed extension. It did. So that's good. Also back on the Sky router.

They're (BT, that is) coming out on Wed AM with dire warnings of payment required if no fault found. I just wish it wasn't intermittent. It's worse in the evenings too. Good job they're coming in the morning then :-|

BT tell you all sorts of rubbish - my line is very old, and forever going wrong, and on one occasion when I had all sorts of pops and squeaks on my line, I told the BT person that it was probably the antique copper that runs down my road. When they called me back, they said it definitely wasn't that cable, because the fault was within 500 metres of the exchange. When the BT guy came to fix it, the line fault had magically moved to 500 yards from my house

He's been and gone, I'm on a new pair now. Fault reproduced whilst he was here at the test socket. Yay.

I now get the following stats from the sky router:

Down Up
SNR (dB): 8.3 13.0
Attn(dB): 59.0 31.5
Pwr(dBm): 15.9 2.3
Max(Kbps): 1408 1024
Rate (Kbps): 1248 416

Which, to me, is a little disappointing. I was getting ~5 Mbps when I first got Sky. I can't hear any noise on the line.

Will this improve over time or do I need to do something else to get it to try harder, or is this it for good now??

Ta

How far are you from the exchange ? An attenuation of 59dB usually means that you are about 3 to 4 kms away. It would be unusual to get a 5M connection on a 59dB attenuation line.

2 - 3 miles according to google maps and my estimation, so that's about right.

I used to get much higher than this though, even though the noise has gone now

Something may have decreased the signal-to-noise ratio on the line, and lots of things can do that. Even putting ADSL on adjacent pairs in the cable can cause the SNR to drop.