Broadband problems in the Broomhill area of Bristol

[#1]

I'm just wondering whether other people in my area are having problems with Broadband reliability.

The reason is that a new house has been built in Birchwood Road and its telephone line has been attached to an old pole which supplies only one other house. The line crosses the garden of that other house and passes within 10-15ft of of a short-wave transmitting aerial, with which it is approximately parallel. If that line is taking the short-wave transmissions into the bundles of cables under the ground I would expect it to play havoc with broadband in the area every time the licenced amateur presses his/her talk button. Short-wave is a generic term for frequencies between about 1.5 and 30MHz, which is roughly the same frequency spectrum as ADSL2+, so I would expect severe interference, and I wonder whether other customers in the area experience similar problems to my own.

I have not yet had an opportunity to knock on the amateur's door and compare notes on transmission and drop-out periods, but would like to do so. Extreme tact is needed, there, though, because amateurs are accustomed to receiving accusations of causing interference and tend to be very defensive as a result. They are, after all, taking part in an activity for which they have a government licence, so they have the highest authority to do what they do, and if other people experience problems with their equipment it is the equipment, not the amateur, which is to blame. In this case it would be the telephone engineer who thought stringing a line within a few feet of a transmitter aerial was a good idea.

So, are others having difficulty, or am I the only one?

[#2]

Hello @kjpetrie

Sorry to hear you are experiencing problems with your connection. , I have a check of the connection and there definitely seems to be something out of place somewhere  as you can see from the i9mage below. Although our tests aren't picking up exactly what's causing the issue so we will have to do some troubleshooting to start ruling things out.

I'd recommend starting with basic checks here.

And if that doesn't help the next thing would be to rule your internal wiring out by plugging the connection into your test socket which is under the faceplate of your master socket and seeing if the drops stop. This rules out internal wiring, face plates and extension sockets as being the cause. How to locate the test socket and set your connection into it can be found here.

If the drops persist we would advise to raise a fault here, so we can investigate the problem further.

[#3]

Thank you for your comments. There is already a fault ticket open for my problem and I am well past all those internal tests. The reason for my post was to see whether there is a particular problem locally, as if the issue I've spotted is a problem I would expect multiple problems in my locality, not just a problem for me.

That no one else has replied to this thread suggests there is no particular problem with drop-outs in this area, so maybe that line close to an aerial is not the issue I thought it would be.

There seem to be a lot of people experiencing random drop-outs at present, though. It looks like one of the main issues bringing people to this forum, so I do wonder what has happened to make this sort of issue more common at this time.

[#4]

There's numerous potential causes for drops in connection and what affects your line may not affect another,

I can see at the moment it's stable but if the drops continue we'll need to get a engineer out.