2 mth fibre install suddenly loses sync then big speed drop

Hello everyone.

On 10 Mar 2014 BTw contractor arrived and unpacked an ICL modem then left. Speed tests confirmed my download was around 16Mb and my upload was around 2.25Mb. For 2 months after the install everything worked the same, day or night then on Sunday 11 May the modem lost sync.

An engineer from BTw arrived Monday afternoon and swapped out the modem for a Huawei which also would not sync, he replaced that with my modem then he went to the cabinet and from there he phoned me to see if the modem was syncing which it was, but my LAN was knocked out. The engineer came back to the house and changed the modem again for the Huawei. It synced right away (the modem light went solid) and he left

Speedtests showed that my speeds had taken a hit and I was getting around 10Mb down and around 0.5Mb up. I spoke to Zen, my ISP who said that the line looked like it had never managed the speed I was quoted and they would ask BT to send out another engineer.

He arrived on Wednesday 14 May about 9am and said he could see errors on the line. He went 200 metres down the road to a manhole and spend four hours with a colleague to no avail. He said the only spare pair was longer than mine and its speeds being worse there was nothing else he could do. There was some condensation and he had cleaned that up so had fixed the errors he was seeing but that was all the speed the line was able to deliver.

My ISP phoned again yesterday afternoon to say that there was definately a fault and they would escalate it with BTw. The line had held a 2.25Mb upload for 2 months, clearly something was wrong, and they would definately be pressing BTw to fix the problem as they could guarantee a minimum of 2Mb upload. An appointment was booked again for an engineer to visit tomorrow Friday the 16 May in the morning.

I little while ago Zen called again to say that should the engineer not be able to fix the problem and this was a third visit then the engineer would need to log the fault as a clear code so that my service could be cancelled so that we wouldn't go round in circles sending out engineers.

What would you do in my position ?

Have I posted this thread in the wrong forum ?

Zen forum is here http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen.html

Thanks, however I do not think Its a Zen specific problem, I only mentioned them.

Edited by deleted (Sun 18-May-14 17:37:01)

I dont know, you stuck in a hard place.

Its possible a distruber pair had vdsl activated and this is crosstalk, in which case you screwed if the only spare pair is worse.

However if its crosstalk (which supposedbly affects long lines less) then a drop you have reported seems very large. Especially on the upload.

There is escalation procedures that zen should be able to follow. So an idea is to ask zen to escalate it. I am reffering to the HLE's

https://www.btwholesale.com/pages/static/Application...

Speed boost engineer arrived on Friday 16th May. Spent all day here and after changing/replacing what he could there was little difference to attainable speeds. He said the line I was on is probably already the best one. He also performed a lift and shift and spoke to his help desk for a bit. However due to the lift and shift the help desk now had nothing to look at (so they said - where is the log from the port I was on ?) End result of the visit is the engineer telling me there are no faults on my line and any other engineer visits will likely incur a charge. (Zen since said they would contest the charges and not to worry, should they feel the need to send out another engineer).
Zen escalated this to HLE who have since said they where not willing to take on the case. My ISP are now pushing for me to make a decision about keeping the line or not.

What is eating at me is why my upstrean sync rate is slower than it was when I was connected to the exchange and not to a cabinet which is much closer (the cabinet is less than half the distance to the exchange). My attainable speed is now DS 14128kbps and US 890kbps. If I power cycle or reboot the modem, it never syncs at 890 always much lower even when my SNRmargin is sitting as high as 7.2dB (upstream).

I have since installed an unlocked hg612 and can see my stats, but that is now and not before the fault. Is someone (better than me) able to take a little time and look over what stats I now have if I where to post them somewhere. My gut tells me something is wrong but my BTo are saying that is all the line can and will ever support (however it has since jumped from DS 10Mb to 14Mb and US 0.5 to 0.7) despite previous speeds before the fault.

Your a better person than I if you can figure this out for me.

Thanks in advance.
Stuart

Edited by deleted (Tue 10-Jun-14 14:12:54)

What's ADSL like where you are.... No way would I pay for "fibre" and get any speed below 30mbps.

If your close to the exchange then wouldn't it be worth getting an ADSL connection instead as it may give similar speeds for a lot less the price...

It seems like you aren't going to get any help with this if Zen are offering to cancel the line.

I'm also assuming that Virgin Media is not available either.

ADSL speeds last sync before changing where DS 9367 kbps US 1075 kbps with SNRM of 6.0. My DS attenuation was 44.5 and US attenuation was 25.6. So I would guess at around 3 KM from the exchange.

I was with adsl24 who changed to Coms and they used Talk Talk for the LLU and my upstream speeds dropped to 443 kbps with Coms.

I was paying around £30 a month with adsl24 and allowed 45 Gig peak traffic (up and down) so at least I am saving £3 lol. I also have unlimited usage with Zen, so the family can watch Iplayer now during the early evening.

I value the support I could/can/have had from Zen, not having to deal with Indian call centres.

I'm just gob smacked that my US attainable speed appears to have dropped so much almost over night.

My plan at the minute is to (try) leave the connection alone for a few weeks.

No Virgin here. I had that when I lived in East Kilbride up until 7 Years ago. I was an early adopter with BlueBlunder (sorry Yonder) when it was a 512/128 kbps service (It was better then in some ways).

I live in South Ayrshire now and it is semi rural near Prestwick airport My exchange is also Preswick.

Edited by deleted (Tue 10-Jun-14 20:34:07)

If I was in your shoes I would switch my line to plus.net ADSL and as they are using BTw network then you could get better than you used to (downstream attenuation)

But its if the difference in speed and price really matters to you.

I'm not so sure I would like plus net. I like being a part of Zens smaller family. Cost wise I do not have a problem. It was worse on ADSL (see post above)