Hi Phil
Thanks for the reply which sounds like I am on the right track. To be fair, this has nothing to do with my Plusnet account at all - I wish it did ! I have a house in France where I pay four times as much in rental for my broadband as I do with Plusnet in the UK for a lousy, unreliable 512 kb service, and if anything goes wrong, I just get the usual "Gallic shrug" and verbal "Prrr." ! Not even the dear old GPO Telephone was ever as bad in terms of customer service, but then France Telecom is of course a good old state monopoly and have no real competition. So much for my problems !
Now, I live in a very rural community in the UK, a couple of miles from the exchange but get about 6Mb download speed with Plusnet. In France, I live in an identical environment but I have only just discovered that I receive Range Extended ADSL which may explain a lot of things. The internet is always falling out. I listen to UK radio using a dedicated Internet Radio (not on the computer), and the BBC is always dropping out. VOIP and Skype are painful while landline telephone rates are of course prohibitively expensive - it is actually cheaper to use my UK Virgin mobile phone despite the roaming charges, but only if I can get a signal ! And one of the major problems I face is that, while I can control the central heating remotely using a DTMF tele-switch, I regularly get a "fax hand-shake" tone interrupting the call to the tele-switch which stops it connecting.
In view of what you say about "cross-over" I wonder whether at last I have found the explanation for this "fax handshake" ? Could the RE-ADSL be the cause by any chance ? I would be grateful for your opinion and for your thoughts on the various other problems which I have mentioned.
