Downtime tonight - 4th Aug

[#1]

When you see a 172.x.x.x range as an IP address this mean that you have a DSL connection to the exchange but no connection to your ISP. You expect to see this when there is work on the backhaul and I did in the early hours of the morning. This will not effect your sync speed at the time or when the the work is completed. Unless you reboot the modem or if your modem force a reboot. Then a new sync speed can be given depending on the time of day etc.
Here is my data for my modem and you can see the DSL connection have been up for more than 4 dayds but my internet connection only about 7 hours which is from approximately 02:30 this morning which correspond with the work finishing.

Quote

DSL Connection  Link Information Uptime: 4 days, 19:02:48  Modulation: G.992.5 annex A Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: 891 / 3.068  Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [GB/GB]: 0,97 / 2,78  Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]: 12,5 / 0,0 Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]: 28,5 / 49,0 SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]: 4,0 / 7,0 Internet   Connection Information   Uptime: 0 days, 6:54:51 Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [MB/GB]: 750,54 / 2,45 Username: xxxxxxx@plusdsl.net Password: ******** Remember Password: Yes IP Address: xxx.159.12.xxx Primary DNS: 212.159.6.10 Secondary DNS: 212.159.6.9

[#2]

After 5 days of slow rates mine appear to be back to normal this morning. See my post http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,78222.0.html

[#3]

@IC9000 that's good news, let's hope it stays that way!
@Neondaze let me know how you find things over the next day or two.
@toulouse TonyOCL, are your concerns only with the variations in sync speed? It's the really bad throughput some have been reporting that concerns me most.

[#4]

@Bob Pullen,
Hi Bob and thanks for taking the time to ask.
No, my concerns are not solely about variations in sync speed. My understanding is that variations in sync speed go with the territory with ADSL2(+), or am I wrong about this ?
My concerns are centred around the events of the 23/24 June. I joined the trial, effectively from 1 May, and my initial connect speed was at 11939, attenuation of 35, and SNR of between 6-7. Over the six weeks or so between 1 May and 23/24 June my connect speeds varied between the 11939 and well over 12000 (highest was 12739 for 4 days just prior to 23/24 June). Now I don't know what it was that happened overnight 23/24 June, I was told unofficially that there had been a major failure of an important 21CN node, somewhere in Ilford, but I have since seen no further mention of that.  I raised a ticket through the Help Centre, and eventually 2 BT Openreach engineers got involved. One from my local exchange, and one actually visited my flat to 'inspect my dodgy internal wiring'. In both cases, no problems were found. During the 2nd engineers involvement, he contacted BTs Help desk, and they did something which restored my line to the kind of speeds which I had been seeing prior to 23/24 June. But sadly, that was very short lived. Since that time, my profile, as reported both by the Plusnet Member centre and the BT Broadband Performance checker has varied from as low as 6500 up to 9000 and back again, while for the 6-7 weeks prior to 23/24 June it had been constantly reported as 10000. The most recent update to my ticket has mentioned something about 'Banded Profiles', and it is my current suspicion that I have unfortunately become a victim of one of these EVIL tools employed by BT. I strongly believe that if that is the case, my current involvement in the trial is analogous to trying to drive a high performance car with both the handbrake and footbrake fully engaged. I know my line is capable of much higher speeds than I am seeing at the moment, so the problem must lie somewhere other than my premises.
So I guess you could say that my concerns are more about what Plusnet or BT (and I suspect it is probably BT) are currently doing to restrict my use of 'High Speed Broadband'.
Sorry for ranting, all I want to do is get back to how things were,

Bye for now

toulouse

P.S. needless to say, with my current profile (possibly one of the banded ones - I'm waiting to find out), I am currently seeing download speedtests in the region of 6400 - 6500, much the same as I was getting before starting on the trial, i.e. 8128(d)/448(u) resulting in test results on mybroadband.co.uk 6400-6500 depending on time of day.

[#5]

Hi
Just to add my 2pence worth.I have had a ticket open for weeks regarding my
very poor downloads speeds,
I gave up trying to get it sorted,,even though all my logs showed no problems my end
trying to convince support of that was a waste of time !
So I am now moving on after 5 years,it seems service has gone downhill
since the BT takeover.
Now since last nights outage, my speeds have returned to 5 meg +
pity it is to late,as  now My Mac key has been passed on to my new provider,
Later

[#6]

Oh well thought it was to good to be true ?
Today 15:39  614 kbps (76.8kB/s)  816 kbps (102kB/s
Today 15:37 694 kbps (86.8kB/s) 816 kbps (102kB/s)
Today 13:58 2072 kbps (259kB/s) 813 kbps (102kB/s)
Today 13:51 4947 kbps (618kB/s) 814 kbps (102kB/s)
Today 13:50 4816 kbps (602kB/s) 815 kbps (102kB/s)
Seems not to be fixed after all
Later

[#7]

Quote from: Bob

@Neondaze let me know how you find things over the next day or two.

Hi Bob,
Ran some speed-tests this morning and this evening. I attach for your perusal. I think you will agree that they make interesting reading!

8/5/2009 6:19 PM BST 212.159.77.140 0.99 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 37 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 6:08 PM BST 212.159.77.140 0.93 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 29 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 6:07 PM BST 212.159.77.140 0.90 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 21 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:48 PM BST 212.159.77.140 2.22 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 43 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:46 PM BST 212.159.77.140 3.38 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 36 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:44 PM BST 212.159.77.140 2.38 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 29 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:38 PM BST 212.159.77.140 2.86 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 21 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:37 PM BST 212.159.77.140 2.03 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 35 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:35 PM BST 212.159.77.140 1.75 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 27 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 5:34 PM BST 212.159.77.140 1.76 Mb/s 0.91 Mb/s 21 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 7:40 AM BST 212.159.77.140 13.11 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 41 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 7:39 AM BST 212.159.77.140 13.16 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 34 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 7:37 AM BST 212.159.77.140 12.94 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 29 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 6:51 AM BST 212.159.77.140 11.42 Mb/s 0.93 Mb/s 42 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 6:45 AM BST 212.159.77.140 12.83 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 34 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/5/2009 6:43 AM BST 212.159.77.140 12.27 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 28 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/4/2009 10:57 PM BST 212.159.77.140 0.88 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 33 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi
8/4/2009 10:56 PM BST 212.159.77.140 0.83 Mb/s 0.94 Mb/s 35 ms Manchester ~ 50 mi

With the first few tests this morning I thought the engineering work last night had cracked it. Unfortunately as can be seen from this evening's results the throughput is again substantially lower that what my router and profile (currently 14000) indicates. I should be getting constantly over 10 MB/s if not higher.
So do I now return to my ticket and request that arrangements are made for a BT engineer to visit and run tests at my property. Not sure if that will help, and loathe to pay £144 if he finds nothing wrong. It is also disconcerting that some of the other members of the trial have reported similar if not the same issues as me and yet a correlation has not been found.
Looking for some advise as to the next course of action.
Kind Regards
Kevin

[#8]

i belive i dont have any vartion of my insanely high 2500kbps.
But i will run an off peak on peak test tomoro. i dont expect to see any slow throughput as i am running elevted weighting add on which should give a minum of 3000kbps 90% of the peak time acording to BTw

[#9]

Quote from: ASBO

@tonyOCL did you try resync when it went down last night as this work had nothing to to with your conection to the exchange. i stayed synced through out and keepted lookin on my routers auth page. some times it would get a 172 ip for 5 mins and others times it failed completly.

I rebooted my router yesterday and today, but still just over 8k.
When you say re-sync do you mean reboot?
Thanks

[#10]

Rebooting is fine - basically just make sure that the router is disconnected from the ADSL and then given chance to resync then reconnect.

[#11]

Yesterday my downstream sync speed was 9,634 kbps which is slightly lower than it has been recently and my upstream sync speed was 447 kbps.  Today my downstream sync speed is 10,229 kbps and my upstream sync speed is 855 kbps.  My downstream SN Margin has been set at about 9.5 dB since late May and there has been no change in that figure.  Prior to late May my downstream SN Margin used to be 6.0 dB or 3.0 dB.  As a result of the change in SN Margin, download speeds have dropped by at least 2,000 kbps.

[#12]

well, after some encouraging improvements yesterday, tonight at midnight I am back to half my normal rate. Mine seems worse later at night, not sure why that would be, obviously I would expect the opposite.

[#13]

Quote from: toulouse

No, my concerns are not solely about variations in sync speed. My understanding is that variations in sync speed go with the territory with ADSL2(+), or am I wrong about this ?

You're right. When you get a "normal" sync rate above about 8Mbps on ADSL2+ then it's not unexpected to see fairly large variations in the sync rate depending on all kinds of things.
The sync rate is determined by a number of things, one of them being the SNR. SNR means signal to noise ratio so the more signal and less noise the higher the line will sync effectively. And the lower the attenuation the higher the signal of course.
The big variant can be the noise, noise can be caused by all sorts of things from street lights to microwave ovens, anything really that can cause RF interference. Some people will notice their sync rates are higher early in the morning than in an evening for example because there is more background RF interference.
When you start getting up to the very high speeds though a small amount of noise which for me on a long line might only knock the sync rate down by 0.25Mbps could cause your sync rate to drop by 2-3Mbps. In percentage terms the speed decreases are probably very similar but you probably notice 12Mbps going to 10Mbps more than 1.9Mbps going to 1.7Mbps.
The big problem with rate adaptive DSL technologies is that there will always be a trade off between speed and stability. BT could remove the DLM and let every get the highest speed but the cost would be significantly higher numbers of faults from dropping connections. Whether the DLM is now too aggressive is another question though and one I suspect needs a lot more looking in to, it's almost a shame we don't have an "unstable" option we can set the DLM to to try and compare what a line is like without it. I'll raise that though on the weekly update and see if we can get an insight on how BT think it's working.

[#14]

This doesn't appear to be so
My sync rate is set in concrete between resyncs; my noise margin flutters up and down.
I have a couple of charts (covering the same period), readings taken every 30 seconds:-

[#15]

Might be a coincidence, but my Internet went down at about midnight on the Aug 4th. Still was not up the next day, so left my router turned off as I was going out. When I turned my router back on yesterday (6th). I could connect to the Internet, but had VERY slow speeds (worse than dial up), and connectivity issues with some sites. But the router show a line speed of about 4Megs. Ping times to the Plus net DNS servers where more than 1000ms, and time outs. I work with a few people who are also on the 21CN trial, and it seems they have the same issue, and we are all on the Weymouth exchange. I have logged a call this morning, and has now been escalated. Anyone else faced similar problems.? Would be interesting to hear from anyone else on the Weymouth exchange on the 21CN trial.