Major line quality / connection issues

Hey peeps, got some really wierd stuff going on.

We're currently using a Tiscali contracted (although now TalkTalk) line on ADSL2+ which as of last Thursday was quite happily synchronising at ~8100kbps down. As of last Friday, the connection slowed to a complete crawl (speedtest.net reported 0.64Mb/s) and then altogether refused to load pages. This persisted from 16:15 through to 18:26 (even through multiple router resets) and once the connection finally regained stability, sync speed dropped to 6668kbps.

The same thing happened on Saturday from 19:00 through to 19:30, and then on Sunday the same issue occurred at 15:30. I ran a 100-packet pingtest at 16:00 with these results:

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 54 received, 46% packet loss, time 99214ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 26.121/28.536/72.300/6.097 ms

Trying to connect to anything was impossible (loading google took 5m+). We eventually called Customer Service at 16:35 with a suspected line fault, and after 33 minutes trying all the standard stuff (unplug your router, clear cache, reset router etc etc) we were told we'd be called back in 48 hours and we should provide a log of what's gone on (which is REALLY useful, thanks guys.)
The problem continued until exactly 11PM (which was a huge issue because I had a fair amount of work I could have been getting on with) when the connection SUDDENLY burst back into life (which seems a little too ironic), and after looking at the router again the sync speed dropped to 6008kbps.

The connection seems okay today, but I'm still a little worried it's going to go off and screw up again, and I'm not really able to rely on it. Do you guys have any suggestions on what we should do? We don't really want to force an engineer visit because if it is us, it's £120 down the plughole. We don't really want to change ISP's because to be brutally honest, there isn't anyone worth their salt to change to at our exchange apart from BSkyB (STRINGW).

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Some line statistics for you (of real note is the attenuation which was normally ~30db)

--- System Information ---
Vendor: Linksys
ModelName: WAG120N
Firmware Version: A1.00.16 , 2010-08-06T14:08:04
GUI Version: A1.00.16_007
Boot Version: 1.0.37-5.4
Hardware Version: 0.01

--- DSL Information ---
DSL Driver Version: 3.4.4.10.0.1
DSL VPI/VCI: 0/38
DSL Status: Up
DSL Mode: ADSL2
DSL Channel: 0
DSL Upstream Rate: 1020 kbps
DSL Downstream Rate: 6008 kbps

Down up
DSL Noise Margin: 86 dB 129 dB
DSL Attenuation: 189 dB 369 dB
DSL Transmit Power: -384 dBm -399 dBm

Also, when coming back from town on Friday there was a rather ominous Openreach engineer sat in his van outside our cabinet. I'm expecting that he screwed something up.

Edited by deleted (Mon 31-Jan-11 17:11:53)

you need to narrow down where the packet loss occurs, using MTR or similar. You can post the output between code tags

If it stopped at precisely 11 I wonder if it was broken traffic management

If and when the issue returns I'll give it a bash and post the results. I still don't understand where we've gained 300dB attenuation, though.

Edited by deleted (Mon 31-Jan-11 17:15:36)

Any chance the router is in it's death throes ?

Tried a tiscali-issued TG585 when I was getting the issues, no effect.

I haven't had any issues today apart from the attenuation jump.

Most likely buggy firmware reporting an incorrect value, if it was over 300dB it would certainly not work.

Those dB figures are reported in tenths of a DB. But the Down/Up attn. figures look swapped.