Orange WBC migration woes

After being migrated from LLU to WBC on 21/4/11, the first week was good. I was getting slightly faster D/L and U/L speeds. Then the next week I watched my speeds slowly drop and my noise margin go up. I thought that whilst I was still within my 10 day 'training period' it'll settle down soon. How wrong I was! I kept losing my connection and totally lost it on 12/5/11. Called Orange Tech Support and after half an hour of tweaking finally got my internet back.

Then today, I twice lost my internet connection within 3 hours. After rebooting my router the second time I rang Orange Tech Support again to see if they knew what was going on.

It seems that the BT engineers have migrated more people to WBC than the equipment and the engineers can cope with and this is why some people are experiencing problems with speed and lost connections. Tech Support have been advised to flag up to their managers all customers who ring up and complain that they're having problems since migrating. These details are going to be passed along to goodness-knows who but they're going to look into the problems deeper.

I have had to let them know my router stats, my IP address and what I got on my last BT Speedtest as this differs as to what Orange have on their system for what I should be getting. It seems that I should be getting an email soon from Orange (I'm not holding my breath) when they've figured out what's going on and what is being done to rectify the situation.

If anyone else has been migrated to WBC at an exchange that is 21CN-enabled and are experiencing problems, it may be advisable to ring Tech Support so their account can be flagged up too as from what I gather, Orange aren't aware just how many people/exchanges are affected.

Jinger

What are your stats now?

And what were they on LLU, if you remember?

i joined orange last thursday, im very happy with the speed, the ping is amazing do you think they could make it any faster?

my line stats

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 16068 kbps 1159 kbps
Line Attenuation 32.0 db 15.8 db
Noise Margin 6.1 db 6.3 db

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1298587263.png

Edited by deleted (Mon 16-May-11 17:00:30)

No, you're lucky, you are getting top speed for your line. On a shorter line, I'm only getting:

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 11251 kbps 1107 kbps
Line Attenuation 26.0 db 14.4 db
Noise Margin 15.2 db 9.3 db

This is on a line that got 15-16 Meg on LLU and during the 1st 2 days on WBC. Since then the only way is down

Today, I've got Orange escalating the problem. I noticed when I called their Support line that the recorded announcement stated there is a known problem on connections, without saying what or whether it was related to the move to WBC.

However, I was shocked to be told bt the Support guy that on LLU they were giving faster speeds than the line was capable of! He would not accept that such a claim was nonsense, even when I told him I got the same speeds on O2 LLU as Orange LLU.

your noise margin looks very high, 15.2db the default on WBC is 6.db i think.

hope this helps

Tom

Just came across this thread when talking to tech support who directed me to thinkbroadband to run a speedtest. (which wouldn't even run!) I was moved to fibre optic in April and have had nothing but problems. Current download speed is 0.5mb. My router shows a downstream rate of 10860. Was on the phone for an hour last night and 1/2 hour tonight to be told that the problem is at the exchange. I have reset my router so many times its untrue. Never had any problems before the change and wish they hadn't bothered to be honest. Sick of it. I am on a free package with my mobile so reluctant to move as you would be, when I was getting DL speeds of 7.5mb up until before the change and (sometimes) 8mb in the last week, then all goes belly up.

Yes, thanks, I knew that!

It's Orange/ BT WBC that's controlling the NM. I'm awaiting them setting it to a more sensible value before I start tweaking it myself. However, I should not need to have to do that if they set it to 6 dB. Unlike LLU where Orange's standard NM was 10 dB and I could tweak it down so as to achieve a 19 Meg Sync.

In reply to a post by stusid72:

I was moved to fibre optic in April and have had nothing but problems.

You are off-topic! Orange don't do fibre optic.

Or are you confusing WBC, which is ADSL2+ over normal copper phone lines, with FTTC, Fibre to the Cabinet?

how do you tweak it yourself? could i tweak my NM down to 3.0db?

thanks tom

Depends what router you have.

You can with a Netgear DG834GT or DG834 v4 (see: Override Target SNR) or perhaps some other router that accepts TELNET and supports adslctl commands.

I bought my new DG834GT cheaply on eBay specifically for this purpose