and what is zens attitude if you refuse to accept the BTOR charges?

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

and what is zens attitude if you refuse to accept the BTOR charges?

they will refuse to send the engineer,

I know, this is why I originally capped the modem downstream speed which stopped or greatly minimised this problem as I was under the impression it might be something that can't be resolved such as crosstalk. However I don't believe this is normal for pretty much any line to produce this number of ES consistently. I've eliminated every possible idea I can think of what could be causing this internally without any success.

I might unfortunately be in for a hard time in getting Zen to agree there's a problem that needs resolving (despite the GEA test passing, although with 'possible copper line fault'), rather than just allowing DLM to eventually apply enough amounts of error correction and/or banding and then them telling me the problem is gone when infact it's just being masked by DLM's intervention(s).

I guess if I can't get anywhere next week then I'll need to weigh the possibilities of looking to leave Zen and possibly paying an early termination charge, or risk an Openreach engineer coming out (if I agree to the risk of being charged a fee) to tell me he/she can't find a fault and then getting me to pay for the visit.

EDIT (02/09 17:59): Interesting, while there's still a small amount of ES the number of them dropped just after 17:15 by the looks of it. I'm starting to wonder if a business nearby might be running something during working hours, if that's the case then I might be out of luck to get this resolved.

EDIT (02/09 18:11): Nevermind, it's back again perhaps.

Edited by Ixel (Sat 02-Sep-17 18:11:48)

DLM has kicked in now, you can see what the linux test gives off peak.

I'll try it late tonight, a bit after midnight should be off peak ideally. While it's worth trying I'm just not entirely certain what it'll confirm. If the router IP address is being pinged and is still getting packet loss intermittently then either it's something external and beyond my control or it's something on the router. Nobody here is using an excessive amount of download or upload speed from what I can see.

Perhaps after tonight's Linux test maybe I should try turning on QoS and configure it at a roughly conservative 80% of the download and upload sync rate. This would hopefully eliminate the remote possibility that something here is consuming a lot of download/upload to cause the router pings to periodically result in packet loss.

As for DLM, yeah that was to be expected. I'm expecting Zen to call me on Monday saying the errors have gone when in reality they are just being masked by interleaving. I've also ordered myself a shortwave radio (1711 to 29999 kHz) which I can tune in to around the impacted frequency to be certain that there's nothing in the house that could be contributing to this problem. I wish I knew why it briefly 'calmed down' at around 17:15 for a short time yesterday.

Edited by Ixel (Sun 03-Sep-17 12:42:39)

Interesting...

Well I just noticed my SNR fluctuating, also my D3 band on the SNR graph looks horrific from this morning's sample. Just a moment ago I had a fluctuating SNR and after doing a QLT (no noise) suddenly it's stabilised. Surely this isn't right, there must be a fault? I've lost 1 dB downstream SNR however (down to 5 or so now) rather suddenly from 6 dB.

http://i.imgur.com/Tvrbrm9.png

Also on MDWS as Ixel.

EDIT: Here's D3 band looking awful before I did a QLT - http://i.imgur.com/mDcFQdG.png.

Edited by Ixel (Sun 03-Sep-17 22:54:05)

I am interested what happened with the speedtest.

Did a couple last night and got fairly similar results unfortunately. (EDIT: Sorry linked to an old one, can't find the new ones logged, prob as I wasn't logged in). Single threaded downstream speed started off at the maximum then dropped to half or one quarter of the potential downstream speed, while multi-threaded was fine.

I've got my Tecsun radio this morning and did a check around the frequencies that were severely affected yesterday evening for a short time but when I'm near the master socket I get very little noise other than from the modem (of course). I'm also thinking of changing my DrayTek for a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter to ensure there's zero doubt that there's a performance problem here that's causing packet loss. Just seems like I'm spending a fair bit of money though in order to eliminate everything my end, I honestly can't believe the DrayTek has an issue.

EDIT 2: I've noticed some noise coming from the UPS which is probably the closest thing to the master socket area so I'll eliminate that by turning it off temporarily. Hopefully I can just switch it over to mains only and it will stop generating noise. One other nearby appliance is my computer equipment, it's under a metal loft bed so maybe the metal frame of the loft bed is acting as an antenna enough for the phone wiring along the outside wall or master socket to pick this up? Only way to be sure would be to turn off the PC but then the stats will stop being monitored too so that's a catch 22. I'll try the UPS first and go from there.

EDIT 3: UPS being off made no difference. Router/modem not going via UPS made no difference. Last possibility I can see is the computer but I doubt it. No update from Zen yet but might be a few more hours.

EDIT 4: Update from Zen tomorrow as the person I'm dealing with isn't in today . Oh well, these things happen. Otherwise I noticed another significant swing in SNR today, perhaps a little worse than the one yesterday evening.

http://imgur.com/a/yMYxg

Edited by Ixel (Mon 04-Sep-17 16:53:38)

Well my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter ERPRO-8 arrived this morning and it has now replaced the DrayTek Vigor 2860Vac. It's an impressive bit of kit, and compared to the DrayTek it handles bufferbloat perfectly (smart queue QoS is enabled). Even with QoS on the DrayTek I had about 100-200ms of bufferbloat at times typically, with the Ubiquiti I'm getting around 20-30ms. I did a speed test on thinkbroadband again but I'm still getting a slow single threaded download speed though it might be related to the line fault perhaps. Zen told me they would investigate the intermittent packet loss problem and/or slow single threaded download speed if it still exists after the FTTC connection is better again (e.g. line fault is fixed and minimal errors). Hopefully the line fault will be resolved by the end of the week and the other remaining issues will disappear at the same time.

In reply to a post by Ixel:

I see.

I'm waiting for an update to my ticket, though it won't be till later today I think.

Here's a speed test I did last night in the early hours of the morning: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...

Here's a speed test I did just a minute ago: https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...

It has to be congestion. My ping graph doesn't look impressive either - http://i.imgur.com/TBrMlPW.png

Zen have finally fixed my packet loss and poor single thread speed problems.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/15051995351...

So lets hope it stays this way.

Dave