Something strange happened ...

For the past 18 months or so, I've been reasonably happy with my BT Broadband service (I never thought I'd say that!) but on Saturday morning 4th Feb, at 0615 approx (yes, I happened to be working on something at that time of the morning!) my Broadband suddenly went off, and then came back perhaps 1 minute (or less) later. I saw the light on my Netgear router go orange, and I was unable to connect to the internet, until it then came back green and service was resumed, albeit somewhat slower.
I'm on an ADSL service from a BT Openreach only exchange, and up until now I've been able to receive ~7.5Mb/s Down and ~1.0Mb/s Up, but after this strange outage my speed has dropped to between 3.5Mb/s and 4.7Mb/s with the router now only seeing syncs at 5571kb/s, indicating that I won't see anything much faster. I'm at a loss as to quite what may have happened, although it seems to me that an engineer has perhaps shifted me from where I was (on the DSLAM) getting a good service, to somewhere else where I'm struggling, frankly. My Ping times are now varying from 350mS to 40mS! And that's NOT a typo!
One interesting factor: up until now, whenever I've done a speedtest using Thinkbroadband's Speedtest, it has always identified my provider as BT, but ever since last Saturday's break the tester sees me as being on PlusNet!!
I've been onto BT, but because my speed is greater than 3.3Mb/s they're not interested in doing anything about it "since that's what the contract says".
Anyone got an idea about what I should do next - other than tell BT to stuff it, and go sign up with someone who actually 'cares'??

Edited by JohnUU2 (Tue 07-Feb-17 21:22:57)

It may be on the BT or Plusnet naming there is some IP block sharing going on, and this will cause the odd oddity.

As for the sync, the key to understanding is to restart the modem and grab a set of the stats and share them as soon as its rebooted i.e. connection speed, attenuation and noise margin figures.

Andrew,
That got me back onto BT (as seen by both the Speedtests) but succeeded in dropping my speed down to 4.5Mbs!!
Down Syncs now 5268kb/s Attenuation: 38.5dB and S/N margin as 15.1dB
Up syncs now 1027kb/s Line Attenuation: 24.7dB with S/N margin of 6.5dB

Looks like DLM has bumped your target noise margin to 15dB costing you all the speed.

If line is stable you should get the sync back in an unknown time frame, or its pester ISP for a reset of the target noise margin.

On the landline, if you dial 17070 then take Option 2, what does the line sound like? This is the Quiet line test and it should be silent apart from the voice that tells you this every so many seconds.

What results do you get from this test, IP profile in particular:-

http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com/PerformanceTest...


Edit:
just noticed the the bit about your downstream s/n margin being high.

Edited by Apprentice (Wed 08-Feb-17 10:02:26)

Robertos - The Quiet line test was fine, with no noises or other artifacts apparent.

I'd just received your message (via the e-mail) when at 10:06:52 the DSL went down!!
The DSL returned at 10:10:32 with the Internet connection following at 10:11:39.
It came back showing Syncs at 5723kb/s.
While writing this, it has gone off again (down at 10:16:29) DSL back again at 10:20:11 and Internet at 10:21:14 - this time with Syncs at 5595Kb/s and Attenuation 42dB, with S/N at 14.5dB
Obviously someone's playing games at the exchange (Hockliffe) - hopefully because they're fibre-ing up some parts of the wider area!
Ran the Speedtest, and now with the Line attenuation at 42.0 dB it says it's Good!
Well, "it" may consider it good, but from my perspective, where nothing has changed, a drop to just over 4.4Mb/s from 7.5Mb/s definitely ISN'T!!
I meant to add, that my latency has shot up to 61mS as well.

Edited by JohnUU2 (Wed 08-Feb-17 10:32:24)

In reply to a post by JohnUU2:

The Quiet line test was fine, with no noises or other artifacts apparent.

That's good, but if there had been noise we may have been on track to diagnose the problem.

can you try a different modem.
I have seen adsl modems fail, and give similar symptoms

A bit of a long shot but if you have a spare router connect it up and see if the connection drops as often/or at all compared to the one in use.

Snap, GMTA

You've obviously got a faster BB connection than me

Well, afraid to say that after trying at least three different routers over a couple of weeks, the Sync speed hasn't improved at all. With one router (a slightly older Netgear that I borrowed briefly) it even went down a little more! [Not what I wanted to happen!]
To my mind this all just goes to re-enforce the feeling that some engineer has done something in the local exchange which caused the Sync-rate on my service to be reduced.
When the two BT engineers who came out here last (probably 2 years ago now) when my service was down in the 1Mb/s region, they were seeing syncs at around 6.5MHz when they left, and that then slowly rose (through DLM I presume) until I was getting a fairly steady 7.5Mb/s - until that fateful Saturday morning.
Now I can't get anyone to even look at the service since I'm "receiving something which is above the minimum stated in the contract to supply."
To me, this is symptomatic of the feelings that BTO simply aren't concerned to get the best out of their systems - 'Good enough' is now acceptable. Bah!!