ADSL24 Not Recommended

I held off writing about my quite frankly, shocking and terrible service and support that I have received from ADSL24 since I joined this shambolic ISP.

I was previously with bethere and had been with them for 3 years prior to looking for an ISP who could provide a fibre service at a decent cost. oh, just as a background note I also have been with BT, F2S, Plusnet, eclipse, O2, SKY & VIRGIN so I have experience of support at other ISP's

Anyway, I signed up for ADSL24 and had to wait ages for my install as apparently due to the olympics there was a lack of engineer availability. I booked my appointment for the day after I returned from holiday (Monday PM). Waited in all day.....NO ENGINEER

At 1730 I called ADSL24 to tell them that the engineer still hadn't arrived - they work up till 1800 I was told (yeah right!!) anyway NO ENGINEER

The following day I called to complain - oh we'll look into it.... we'll call you back ( I later had learnt that this means we will never call you back, we'll wait for you to call us and have another moan) - anyway eventually an engineer arrived on Friday and installed the faceplate and extention.

Engineer told me I should be seeing 45MB down / 14MB up this is significantly different to the wholesale checker which tells me 60MB down / 18 MB up (yes I know this is an estimate)

anyway I wait for things to settle down after the install rather than being impatient, I run a speed test (BT SPEEDCHECKER) and find I am getting 40 down and 7 up. Ok whats the problem? So somewhere I have lost 7MB on my upstream speed thats a 50% decrease in my service on the upstream and 5MB on the downstream.

Contact ADSL24 elite team of support engineers - yes this is sacarsm - I was asked to plug the OR modem into the test socket on the master socket - I questioned the engineer as to whether he had indeed ever seen a fibre install - NO was his reply, oh dear, not good

Anyway the whole process has been very boring and tedious and ongoing since 7th September dealing with the support engineers at ADSL24 not one engineer was willing to take ownership of the case although I did get slighly further with an engineer called James who I now think has been abducted by aliens as I haven't heard from him again.

Everytime you call them they want another speedtest, they all need to read through the notes (which I suspect doesn't contain all the information I have provided them) as they repeatedly ask me the same questions.

I have now forced them to book a BT engineer which I may have to pay £110 +VAT to tell me if I actually receiving the service I am paying this god damn awful ISP for. Luckily it's a 12 month contract, I'm already counting down the days.....

My advice to anyone looking for an ISP is DON'T use ADSL24

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

I was asked to plug the OR modem into the test socket on the master socket

I don't want to upset you even more, as you're having a bad time of this, but in the context of your post you seem particularly irate about this bit.

There's nothing at all wrong with that suggestion. In fact it would appear to be essential in this case. The insterstitial filtered faceplate is just a modern, (easier to install), version of the normal ADSL filtered faceplate. There is nothing special about it.

All a broadband filter does is prevent anything outside the audible frequency range passing to or from the phone side of your setup. For broadband only it is perfectly permissible to have no filter.

There have been a considerable number of botched installations by the recently recruited and only half-trained Openreach engineers. I note you say an extension was installed. There could be a problem there. Do you have any other extensions as well? If so, please can we have a reasonably detailed description of what is on them, where the OR modem is on these sockets, and what else is connected?

In summary, it could be a bad installation, or it could be a faulty interstitial faceplate. It might help if we can establish which or neither before the engineer arrives. Make sure when the faceplate is removed that no other extensions work for the phone.

Hi and thanks for your reply.

Believe this or not when I plug the OR modem into the master socket and connect with a PPPOE session the speed is actually slower than when connected to the extention.

All I have connected to this master socket is 2 extentions (1 which the OR installed) and another for the analogue phone line.

So you are suggesting I remove the new faceplate and connect directly to the test socket and create a PPPOE session with the OR modem?

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

Engineer told me I should be seeing 45MB down / 14MB up this is significantly different to the wholesale checker which tells me 60MB down / 18 MB up (yes I know this is an estimate)

anyway I wait for things to settle down after the install rather than being impatient, I run a speed test (BT SPEEDCHECKER) and find I am getting 40 down and 7 up.

Can you give the full results of the BT SPEEDCHECKER including your IP Profile, which is the important bit.

Note that all engineers are OPENREACH engineers, not ADSL24.

IP Profile for your line is - 45.51 Mbps (43.83Mbps reported)
Upstream Rate IP profile on your line is - 20 Mbps (10.64Mbps reported)

That's what the OPENREACH engineer said you should expect too. In my opinion, you have nothing to complain about.

BatBoy has a point. You may unluckily be suffering from congestion at some times of day. You may also however also have a dodgy installation, preventing you getting the original estimate at good times.

I'm still very unclear on the wiring layout. The modem is supposed to be connected using the short VDSL/ADSL cable that came with it, direct to the master. Do you mean the engineer moved the master, and the old master is now an extension? That needs checking. Similarly, once we find the master, if the faceplate on that is removed then everything else should give up.

The socket the modem should connect to looks like the one on this page. If the old master still has a removable half faceplate as in this pic we have a possible problem.

Photos of the inside wiring of all three sockets, uploaded somewhere, might be useful.

Ill take some pics of all the sockets and post back. Thanks for the help

He said I should expect 14MB up? It's never been that since I had it installed

The BT speedtest isn't great for upload speeds, there is a better one - http://mcslhr.visualware.com/myspeed/myspeed_line_ca...

Edited by deleted (Tue 25-Sep-12 17:02:06)

He would almost certainly have been talking about the connection speed, not the throughput. The throughput is always below the connection speed, even on a perfect setup.

He would also have been testing in the ideal setup at your place, which is what we want to get you to with everything working.

ok i've taken some pics

here is the master socket
pic1
pic 2
pic 3

here is the telephone extention socket
pic 1
pic 2


here is the data extention kit that bt installed for the fibre
pic 1


I hope this helps - btw no call from ADSL24 again to say when my engineer will be coming..... what a surprise!!

I tried that one thanks - I get the same speeds

The wiring looks ok to me.... What modem do you have? Echolife HG612?

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

pic 2

here is the telephone extention socket
pic 2

Whoever installed the extension has used burglar alarm cable instead of telephone cable.
This is very likely to contribute to a poor speed.

If you leave the lower part of the NTE5 unplugged (so the extension is disconnected) and power cycle the modem to force a re-sync, is there any improvement?

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

I hope this helps - btw no call from ADSL24 again to say when my engineer will be coming..... what a surprise!!

It's not an ADSL24 engineer, but a BT one. Yes, ADSL24 should have phoned you back when promised, but a no-show isn't their fault - indeed, you'd have had the very same guy installing whether you'd gone with ADSL24 or Sky, since they all use the same BT Openreach team.

Yes its the echolife hg612

you have to book a BT engineer via ADSL24 - hence why I'm waiting for ADSL24 to call me back with the appointment date and time

That's lucky - you can load hacked firmware and see the line stats on that.

In reply to a post by panda:

Whoever installed the extension has used burglar alarm cable instead of telephone cable.
This is very likely to contribute to a poor speed.

If you leave the lower part of the NTE5 unplugged (so the extension is disconnected) and power cycle the modem to force a re-sync, is there any improvement?

Good idea

What will BT's view of this be?

I didn't ask them, I just wanted to see my line stats. Oh, and stop my connection been "managed". As far as I'm aware, I don't have a contract with Openreach who supplied the modem free of charge.

Loads of us have done it.

Get it here. You need the Instructions for unlocking and the Unlocked firmware images from the right-hand menu.

Bald_Eagle1 has some excellent logging and graphing scripts once you have the unlocked successfully completed.

Hi there, sorry to be late to the thread.

The data extension kit that was fitted by the installing engineer is incorrect. They have used internal telephone extension cable, not the required 2 pair hi-twist stuff required. If this data extension kit is running any significant distance, this WILL be having a detrimental affect on your VDSL signal.

Is it stapled or cleated ? Staples may well have pinched the pair inside also, hence it *should* be done in the other type of cable and MUST be cleated.

I haven't read the rest of the thread yet .... If you have hacked the modem, so you can see stats, try again with a 'normal 'ADSL filter in the test socket, all else disconnected, what stats now ?

When the engineer comes, hover over him like a fly round ****. Make sure you are shown that the pair quality test passes with flying colours. Ask to watch the tester on a manual VDSL test, there should be NO errors, CRC's/FEC's showing. Ask that they have the sync recalculated by the FTTC SMC, noting the sync rate, and SNR, both before and after the recalc.

Point out that the data extension kit is just plain wrong, THIS MUST BE CHANGED, free of charge. It may just be this that is screwing things up, but worth having them check the whole installation, if the first engineer did one thing wrong, then there may be other howlers.

Good luck. Keep us posted.

Whoever installed the extension has used burglar alarm cable instead of telephone cable.
This is very likely to contribute to a poor speed.

Yes, alarm wire is pant's for extension wiring, but in this case, does not come in to play as the OP has a VDSL faceplate filter.

Thanks for the info....I've just found out that the engineer is coming today, lucky I'm available!!

I'm planning on recording the conversation that I have with the engineer and will in fact grill him on everything you have mentioned.

I'll update you once the engineer has visited

In reply to a post by jimmyn:

I'm planning on recording the conversation that I have with the engineer and will in fact grill him on everything you have mentioned.

I should do it rather more gently than "grill"ing. If I were a fully trained engineer that could make me less than likely to go the extra mile. Take it easy, with thoughts, suggestions and "someone told me"s .

Tea/coffee and biscuits often oil the wheels. (I like that).

Yes it more the fact that I don't want him walking away saying no fault found! Interestingly I found a page on the BT website saying how the data extention kit is different wiring to the standard phone cable. So as I see it, there is a fault, and that fault is they have used phone wire to cable my data extention kit.

I'll try and take it easy on the engineer my frustration lies mainly with ADSL24. It's now 0953 and they have called me to tell me an engineer will be with me today between 0800-1300. Thanks for that it's not like I'd normally leave the house or anything to go to work.......

I give up!!!!

I can't see why you should be frustrated with the ISP, the install was done by an Openreach engineer.

I think you could identify if the data extension is causing a problem by plugging the modem into the master socket...

ok i've plugged the modem into the master socket like in the pictures below and posted the speedtest again

pic 1
pic 2

As you can see the downstream profile has increased but the upstream speed has dropped down

I meant the master, the top socket here http://i1069.photobucket.com/albums/u476/speedhunter...

maybe that's the one you used

Edited by deleted (Wed 26-Sep-12 10:39:24)

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I can't see why you should be frustrated with the ISP, the install was done by an Openreach engineer.

My frustration isn't over the install it's the customer service / support ADSL24 has. They say they'll call back....they never do - to be honest it seems the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing there

oh I've done that - the speeds are significantly slower when plugged into this

Ah, fair enough. I'm with BT Infinity, which is a whole different level of frustration spanning a few continents.

One of the problems being, as the modem is locked you can't tell what difference the sockets are making to the line stats. You have to guess based on speedtests, which is less than ideal.

OR engineer is currently up the road as there is fault on the pair. He said the AC Balance is high. Also confirmed the original engineer that installed the fibre has made a bodge job of it. Master socket was obselete, telephone wiring used for data extention is wrong. (I've just pulled that out and run some cat5 that he's given me....

I'll update more later

Sounds like it's not chargeable to you then.

well he's very good....and he said there is definately a fault and I'm only 400m away from the cabinet

According to the table here http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.... 400m is good for 42Mbps. It will be interesting to see the IP profile soon.

Don't forget to ask him to ring for the recalc when he has cleared the fault.

AC balance should be high, above 55db, but the higher the better, maybe you misheard him ?
He has you running in the data extension kit yourself ? If he's that good a salesman........
Small price to pay if he finds and clears the fault. Check out the sync rate, SNR, error count on his tester when finished.

400m, you should very nearly see full sync, unless the D-side is aluminium.

Ok here's the update engineer was here ages.

Basically he said the AC balance was too low and that it's supposed to be over 60. He said there was a fault on D and that I need to have a SFI engineer to attend. He's taken out the incorrectly fitted data extention and put in cat5. He's also replaced the master socket faceplate as the one I had was obselete.


I asked about SNR which is 6.2 and the other figure I have was 19.2 which I forgot to write down what it was for.

The IP profile is 46.48 down and 9.69 up - he said there was little point in getting it reset as there was still a fault and after 10 days it would be back where it is now

Back to ADSL24 to get another engineer out.......