Router DSL Speed Report

I have a US Robotics Wireless MAXg ADSL Gateway router. I am in France, using Orange as my ISP on a France Telecom PSTN line.

In the router's ADSL Statistics table it shows the following information:
SNR margin (dB): 8.0 29.3
Attenuation (dB): 66.5 29.7
Output power (dBm): 0.0 12.9
Attainable rate (Kbps): 1816 636
Rate (Kbps): 605 156

The last line of figures equates approximately to the speeds reported by the speed test on this site, but can someone tell me what the preceding line means (Attainable rate).

Is this a suggestion that the line could, in theory, allow faster speed?

My phone is at the end of a very long connection to the (rather old) exchange ( old in the sense that it does not even support Intelligent Networking, such as CLI) so I am happy that I can get ADSL at all!

In *theory* yes, it's what the routers firmware makes of the signal. I'd suggest that with a downstream SNR of 8db, it's doing about what it ought-a.

On the plus side, I know the gulf of Morbihan, and if I was to suffer a dodgy long line for DSL, that would be my first choice.

Is this a suggestion that the line could, in theory, allow faster speed?

Yes, presumably with a 0dB margin , so not leaving any room for interference

Yes it is a long line - as the downstream attenuation suggests. Your SNR is quite low and that is a limiting factor. But there could be hope for you.

The downstream output power is at 0dBm, whereas most DSLAMs can provide up to 19 dBm. (Upstream is fine). Low power is normally only seen on short lines.

If you can persuade your ISP to sort out the transmit power and increase it from 0 dBm then whilst the attenuation will remain the same you should see an increase in the SNR. That should then allow a faster sync speed and then a faster downstream speed.

Thank you for that useful comment MHC. If I can manage to transate this into meaningful French, I will ask Orange if they can tweak the output power. I anticipate a Gallic shrug, however. They still cannot understand why anyone in the countryside needs ADSL! The only thing I will say is that after about a month of constantly losing DNS connections and the ADSL connection going down every few hours someone seems to have made some adjustments. The connection has been stable now for a week!