Has an engineer fixed a fault on my line?

Hi

Hope someone can offer some insight on this one as it's driving me slowly loopy. I'm with BT. Since we moved in here last September, the connection speed has been abysmal, less than 2Mb. I couldn't understand this as we're not that far from the exchange, somewhere between 3 and 4km.

I've contacted BT several times and can't get any sense out of them frankly, even when I eventually spoke to someone helpful in Northern Ireland that led nowhere in the end. I was convinced there was a fault on our line but they didn't agree.

Now last week, my neighbour had an engineer out (she was threatening to change ISP - quelle surprise, they actually did something) and he told her that he found and fixed problems on 3 lines altogether. She says she now gets 5.4Mb. My router is still syncing at 2200 and getting about 1.8Mb throughput.

speedtester.bt.com is telling me that my IP Profile is set to 1750kbps and my router stats say it has Attenuation of about 42dB and Noise Margin of about 15dB. Should that be giving me speeds more like hers than mine?

And if so, how do I get the exchange and my router to play nicely??

Cheers in advance!

If you have a test socket within your BT master socket could you post the attenuations, SNR margins, and sync rates when plugged in there.

Are you sure the ring wire is disconnected?

See http://www.dslzoneuk.net/socket.php?type=html for test socket and ring wire.

An update: I just found a problem with the wiring in the house too. Seems to have been done by the builders. Not good.

Anyway, I've fixed that and now the router is syncing at 4730 but I'm still capped as speedtest.net gives a result of 1.7Mb/s

Will the exchange change my IP Profile automatically at some point or do I have to nag BT?

The profile takes up to a week to respond to an improved sync rate.

Sadly the master socket doesn't exist (see below) and the "main" extension isn't an NTE5.

The point the BT connection comes into the house is just a weird old fashioned blanking plate.

It's behind that that I found the problem with the wiring. The cowboys had just twisted together the wires that run to the 3 phone sockets together with the incoming BT wires. I know you're not supposed to mess with it but I wasn't going to leave it like that so I just joined them with a chocolate box. Hence the big improvement in my 2nd post above.

Oh, and I'm using an NTE5 on the extension that the router's connected to and it has one of those 2 socket ADSL faceplates with the built-in filter. It's the only line that's connected now. The test socket & faceplate socket both give the same results.

The ringer wire isn't connected.

Thanks - I'll be watching it like a hawk for the next week then

Put your current stats into http://www2.farina1.com/ADSL/default.aspx to get an estimate of possible speeds (assuming that your SNR margin eventually drops back to the default 6dB).

That site isn't working currently.

Hey, it decided overnight that I could have 4 Meg. Excellent. Still got 15dB Noise Margin.

So what makes your router decide to go more aggressive on the SNR?

An increase in noise forced it to resync which it did at the highest sync the then prevailing conditions allowed leaving whatever target margin you have been set.

I have an intermittent fault on my line - 4 BT visists and another booked for Wednesday - mine can resync several times a day - at a higher as well as lower sync