Advice needed re noisy line

I need some advice about what to do next.

We were on Orange LLU at a speed of 2Mb (they said that was as fast as we could get) and before that on a fixed speed of 1Mb.

Since changing ISP and going onto Max ADSL we have had an intermittent problem with phone calls causing the ADSL to resync. This doesn't happen all the time, and when it does I can usually hear noise on the phone line. It's not too much of a problem except when it resyncs very low and our actual speed drops very low for the 3 days. I am currently synced at 2336, but am on day 2 of a speed of 126Kbps. When everything is working fine we usually get a speed of about 2Mb, with the occasional 2.5 or 3Mb, but not for very long.

BT Openreach have been out twice. The first man fitted a new filtered master socket, so we are confident that our wiring is not the problem. The second man tested the line at the nearest junction box, which is quite a way from the house, and said he was getting about 5MB there, so the problem was between the box and the house. He said that he thought there was a known temporary fix on a fault that could be causing the problem, and we would have to wait until they could dig up the main road. The feedback BT gave to the ISP was that they couldn't find a fault. Last week when the phone was very noisy I logged a fault with BT voice faults and they said the line was clear.

Our ISP has suggested going onto a fixed 2Mb speed, and says we should be able to get 2Mb, but I am worried that our line attenuation is too high for 2MB. Our attenuation is 58dB and our noise margin is usually around 6.0, but does tend to drop during the evenings. This is on Max. I don't know what our stats were when we were on the fixed 1Mb as our old Netgear DG184 only gives the sync speed.

My questions are

1. Would using something like the Speedtouch 585 help to keep the line stable?

2. With our high attenuation would we be able to get 2Mb if we went back to fixed speed?

3. Is it worth persevering and getting BT to sort out the line?

Thanks
Blossom

I am quite interested in any responses to this.

With an attenuation of 58db, you're only just within the limits for a fixed 1mb speed, so changing to a fixed speed wouldn't be wise.

I would keep plugging away at voice faults until they admit the problem officially and have to dig up the road. You need a good voice line to get BB anyway.

In reply to:

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BT Openreach have been out twice. The first man fitted a new filtered master socket, so we are confident that our wiring is not the problem.

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I would not be that confident until I tried the router in the test socket behind the filter [ie with all premises wiring effectively disconnected]. If I then got the same poor performance, then I would exonerate the wiring.

Thanks for the replies.

I had a feeling we wouldn't be able to get 2Mb fixed speed.

The problem is that the phone noise and resyncing on ADSL is very intermittent. It can be OK for a couple of weeks, and when the problem is back it is sometimes just for a few hours or a few days.

I think I will persevere with BT, probably voice faults, because I think that is where the fault really lies. When I logged the fault with them I had unplugged the router and plugged a wired phone into the main socket and it was very noisy, but the noise disappeared while I was actually speaking to them, so when they did the test it was clear.

Blossom

I had all these problems myself for 18 months, until fixed a couple of months ago by a zealous BT engineer. If you report a noisy voice line that they reckon is your equipment you'll get a

Our house was built in the 1960's so it could be a similar cable problem.

Will persevere with BT.

Thanks

Blossom