Fibre connection dropouts and packet loss

[#1]

I've been with PlusNet a few months on the unlimited fibre 80mbps package - now and then I have had the odd disconnect often around the start of rain. However this week I have been getting frequent unpredictable dropouts of various lengths often preceded by packet loss in the region of 40-50% reported on Teamspeak, occasionally the packet loss goes away briefly but then comes back and I am disconnected from all internet. I reported a fault to PlusNet and in the initial troubleshooting steps found out that there was noise over my phone line, the noise is intermittent but quite loud, I am currently waiting for a call back from PlusNet support.
My router (an Asus RT-N66U running the latest Asus firmware) logs show:
Jan 10 22:56:06 pppd[338]: No response to 10 echo-requests
Jan 10 22:56:06 pppd[338]: Serial link appears to be disconnected.
Jan 10 22:56:06 pppd[338]: Connect time 21.9 minutes.
Jan 10 22:56:06 pppd[338]: Sent 6837419 bytes, received 18776994 bytes.
Jan 10 22:56:06 dnsmasq[300]: read /etc/hosts - 5 addresses
Jan 10 22:56:06 dnsmasq-dhcp[300]: read /etc/ethers - 3 addresses
Jan 10 22:56:06 dnsmasq[300]: using nameserver 212.159.6.10#53
Jan 10 22:56:06 dnsmasq[300]: using nameserver 212.159.6.9#53
Jan 10 22:56:09 WAN Connection: Fail to connect with some issues.
Jan 10 22:56:09 stop_nat_rules: apply the redirect_rules!
Jan 10 22:56:12 pppd[338]: Connection terminated.
Jan 10 22:56:13 pppd[338]: Sent PADT
Jan 10 22:56:13 pppd[338]: Modem hangup
Jan 10 22:56:20 dnsmasq-dhcp[300]: DHCPINFORM(br0) 192.168.1.150 10:bf:48:fb:6c:28
Jan 10 22:56:20 dnsmasq-dhcp[300]: DHCPACK(br0) 192.168.1.150 10:bf:48:fb:6c:28 i5PC
Jan 10 22:56:58 pppd[338]: Timeout waiting for PADO packets
I always get the same message - the connect time varies hugely but over the last few days I have seen anywhere between 3 and 472 minutes.
Rebooting the OpenReach modem or the router have little or no effect, the WiFi will remain connected the entire time and windows will ask for additional login information for the PPPoE connection, this additional information is unnecessary as it's already stored in the router. Attempts to manually reconnect the PPPoE connection via the router achieve nothing (resulting in the router throwing an error saying 'connection timeout ').
Connect time for the previous session (whilst I was writing this post) was 37.1 minutes.
Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Neil.

[#2]

So 2 days on and the problem has not only persisted but got substantially worse. After a phone call with PlusNet I was told there was nothing visible on their system. Immediately after that call I had reasonable internet for a grand total of almost twelve hours, no dropping or packet loss.
After that lovely twelve hours of solid connection, I went back to a substantially more unstable and less usable connection. Up-time and down-time varied hugely but between 3.30am and 11.00am I was exceptionally lucky to see 20 minutes between disconnects. In reality the sustained connection times were more between 3 and 5 minutes.
I am beginning to see dropping of connection without anything being logged in my router. Some of these quicker drops reconnect almost instantly but are enough to temporarily interrupt online gaming or media playback through things like the iPlayer. These are present alongside the modem hangups which are still a persistent issue.
My job for today is to investigate the noise on the phone line - the gentleman on the phone suggested connecting to the test socket. I will do that and if nothing has changed I was told to call PlusNet back.

[#3]

Hi, sorry to hear it's intermittent, though as I'm sure you'll have been told it's pretty much certain that the noise on the line is what's causing the drops in connection. I can see you've called back and had a fault raised on the phone line, looks like an engineer is booked for Friday - hope everything gets sorted out for you. Please let us know how it goes.

[#4]

After another day of bitty intermittent connection I am resigned to a four day wait for an engineer to appear and tell me that my line is knackered. Noise on the line is still present in the test socket and the phone line is getting close to unusable. After some googling I came across a lot of people having issues with older lines in cold and damp weather. As my line was made in the early Neolithic and is insulated in mammoth hide and the weather has been excessively wet recently, I feel this may be contributing to the worsening of the problem.
Whilst on hold waiting for a PlusNet representative the hiss was drowning out medium to quiet bits in the music. Am I wrong in my assumption that this amount of noise should show in SNR statistics on the modem? Is there anyway I can access those statistics in future on the provided openreach modem?

[#5]

Unfortunately not on the modem, no, though it'll be this noise that the engineer is coming to investigate and resolve - he'll test the line from your socket (or possibly the exchange and/or green box) to confirm where the fault is, by the sound of it it's in one of the joins on the cable so will likely be on the pole assuming it's not underground cabling to your premises, which may complicate things.
Either way though he'll be able to get things sorted for you.

[#6]

Status update: Line replaced apparently it was at least 25 years old and it certainly wasn't well. However post replacement we waited 3 days and called and asked for a line resync to hasten getting back up to speed. However speed has not really increased and my mother received a text saying that there was a further issue somewhere. Sadly I have no further details available at the moment.

[#7]

Hi, just tweaked your profile on our side here, should improve things for you? Please let us know. The fault's still open so can be passed back if the issue is still apparent, though we hope everything's sorted now the profile's tweaked?

[#8]

Download speed still crawling I'm sorry to say, upload seems reasonable according to tests.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3262873020
Ping checking seems to have failed on this test inexplicably.

[#9]

Try logging into the router, disconnecting then reconnecting using the buttons on the web pages there, that should force it to pick up the new profile.

[#10]

Oh that seems to have to have put me back to 17.5 down. Much better thanks, I will test further and if there's any further issues I'll message back. Thanks for the quick responses.

[#11]

No worries, really glad it's worked - thanks for letting us know.