As a long-term 'bandee' I agree with James's suspicion (in reply #18 above) that once you've been banded a few times it takes a lot longer than three days for banding to be removed.
My line is very stable with banding (1-3mb/s) applied. I sync at 3069 and get a noise margin of around 15 after a reboot. This drops to about 10 in the middle of the night, but the connection is rock solid. However, it now takes about 4 weeks before banding is removed.
It doesn't last. For a brief period (1-2 days, typically) my sync speed increases, SNR starts at either 6 or 9 after a reboot, drops to zero or below(!) after dark, the line becomes unusable (PPP goes down, and though I think it doesn't register as a line drop from BT's point of view the error count rockets) and banding is restored soon afterwards.
I'm used to it now. For newcomers or the newly-affected, though, it might be nice to put a system in place that would show users when their line is banded. It could maybe sit on the same page (Connection settings.. High-speed broadband) as the 'Current line speed' (aka IP or BRAS profile) setting. That would save time currently spent by PN support staff liaising with the faults team and the faults team checking with BT, and it could also be used to collect statistics. I'm guessing that it's not easy at the moment for PN support to get a clear picture of how many lines are banded.
The main problem might be that BT would have to co-operate.
Graham
