Hi,
I've been a customer for a few years now. Since I signed up I've had a connection speed of about 0.5 Meg (ip profile of 500 KBps), and put it down to living in the middle of nowhere, quality of the line, etc, and just got on with it as I didn't have much of a clue about broadband. However, a couple of months back BT fixed a fault on our line after high winds knocked something loose at one of the nearby poles and after a while I noticed the connection jumped to around 2 Meg. This lasted for about a month, then dropped back to normal, but gave me cause to have a closer look at my connection stats.
For reference, the entire set-up consists of a phone and the modem/ router (2wire BT1801HG supplied by PlusNet when I joined) plugged into a micro-filter, which is plugged into the main (and only) phone socket. It's a pretty old phone line so it's just a standard socket, not nte5, so no test socket to play with. I don't have another router to test with either.
I took some readings this morning for up-to-date stats. I unplugged the phone so it was just router/ micro-filter/ socket.
After a soft reset, the router stats gave:
dsl line (wire pair): line 1 (inner pair)
protocol: g.dmt annex a
downstream rate: 7776 kbps, upstream rate: 448 kbps
channel: fast
current attenuation: 33.0 dB (down), 17.5 dB (up)
current noise margin: 5.0 dB (down), 23.0 dB (up)
The test at speedtester.bt.com gave:
download speed achieved during test - 382 Kbps
acceptable range of speeds is 400-2000 Kbps
dsl connection rate: 7776 Kbps (down), 448 Kbps (up)
ip profile for your line is - 2000 Kbps
The test was not conclusive and further testing is required.
I tried following the instructions to run the tap 3 test, but it gave an error part of the way through both times I tried. It hasn't always requested this test in the past, but when it has it usually just ends up with an error.
As an extra measure, speedtest.net gave:
download 0.50 Mb/s, upload 0.38 Mb/s, ping 43 ms
After plugging the phone back in to the filter, and soft-resetting the router again, the stats were:
downstream rate: 7808 kbps, upstream rate: 448 kbps
current attenuation: 33.0 dB (down), 17.5 dB (up)
current noise margin: 5.0 dB (down), 22.0 dB (up)
so very similar to without the phone plugged in (not really surprising).
The connection details from the Member Centre show that interleaving is on, estimated line speed is not recorded, and last, but certainly not least, current line speed is 0.5 Mb.
I guess this all leads to a couple of queries. Firstly, is there any reason the PlusNet profile is lower than the BT profile and if not can it be pushed up to match? Secondly is there any chance of getting more speed out of the connection as the downstream rate claims to be nearer the 7 Meg mark. I have noticed the noise margin always seems quite low, and there tend to be a lot of 'DSL loss of margin failures' recorded by the router, which I'm assuming is the main issue.
Any help would be greatly appreciated,
Paul
