Useless Plusnet Now ??
Not very helpful Things do improve I know how it was what is it that you suggest and how do I do that ?
Hey @stathe
thanks for keeping in touch. @Townman is correct, your line is quite long, 6520 Metres to be exact, which is why we told you to expect speeds between 1.1Mbps and 2.5Mbps when you last re-contracted. Copper lines are also subject to natural degradation over a long period of time.
I've tested your line this afternoon - I'll pop the results below, which show that in terms of speed, your line is performing within estimates, with downstream speeds coming through at 1888Kbps. I can see that in order to increase stability, we've recently changed the profile of your connection, which does come at the expense of some speed. given the line length, for the most part, the line appears to be relatively stable, though some drops can be seen at the same time during the day. This can indicate some form of regular interference along the line somewhere.
@stathe wrote:
Not very helpful Things do improve I know how it was what is it that you suggest and how do I do that ?
I can understand that hard truths and facts might not be seen as helpful when they are not want you want to hear. However, the bottom line is your telephone line is 6.5km long. You might find this informative - Broadband Speed Checker - ADSL and distance - essentially ADSL is just about viable up to 5.5km and ADSL2 up to 6km both shorter than your line. I was going to ask @adam945 if forcing ADSL(1) might help - but not at 6.5km.
This sentence is key: "Any signal that is carried through the wires is affected by Resistance, Capacitance and Inductance. These characteristics of the copper wire directly contribute to the noise on the line and their effect is greater the longer the line.". Also if somewhere along your line, it runs beside VDSL circuits, it will pick up cross talk - something which increases the greater the number of coadjacent VDSL circuits. So whilst you might not see any changes, you have no knowledge of how the change of the environment elsewhere might impact your service. As I said - physics is physics and you cannot change that.
Changing the line profile to run at 3dB might make the synch speed a little faster, but probably less stable and certainly with a higher error rate. A higher error rate will entail a higher data retransmission rate and thereby a lower effective throughput speed. With lines at the margin as yours is (predicated by the distance between you and the exchange) a slower sync speed might well deliver a higher data throughput speed because of the reduction in errors and retransmission. Sometimes you can get more usable speed with a lower sync rate.
What should you do?
- Switch to FTTC if is available
- Investigate the options for mobile borne internet (4G)
- Move closer to the exchange
- Accept that ADSL at 6.5km is barely viable and sometimes you will be disappointed
As someone has mentioned, copper does "degrade" over time, notably the joints ... if an actual fault can be identified, it might be possible to have BTOR inspect and remake all of the joints on your line - but that could be a long haul. Do you know how far you are from the green cabinet? If you are fairly close to the green cabinet then you might have a short d-side circuit which would be a much smaller challenge to have inspected.
@adam945 is a d-side swap a viable approach here?