ADSL issues

[#1]

Long story short: we got utterly shafted by BT main so moved over to PN, in part because they sold us a fibre connection.  After extensive wrangling PN announced that fibre wasn't suitable at our premises and downgraded us to copper 'at no charge' (how good of them).  They also offered us the option to leave with no penalty as they had missold their services.

Due to the poor performance of the line we opted to have a second installation, again from PN to avoid conflict of blame when things (inevitably) go wrong.  In part this was for capacity but mainly it was for redundancy (as we are a business).

The two lines were originally run through netgear modems.  In the hope of seeing an improvement we swapped one of those out for a billion 8800.  There was no change but, for no specific reason, we have not switched back.  The connections are load-balanced through a netgear switch and are used by a LAN consisting of 3 wired connections (1x desktop, 1x NAS and a wireless bridge) together with one wireless user and ad-hoc wireless connections (mobiles, visitors etc).

Over the past few months we have seen a steady decrease in the performance of our broadband with it now frequently being unusable.  So, for extensive periods of each day we are sat without a working (in the real-world sense) internet connection.  This is not for traffic-heavy operations like streaming, sharing or downloading large files.  We simply can't open our small database or access the PN homepage.

A catalogue of BTW speedtests shows speed ranges from 0 to 14Mb and ping latency from around 14ms to 950ms.  Due to the relative complexity of our installation and the fact that we're a business, being told by PN that we must submit X number of speedtests no closer together than 2 hours for each line before they'll even consider there being a fault is both impractical and, frankly, unhelpful.  This is made worse by the fact that the BTW speedtest doesn't show the user which IP is being tested.  We literally have to unplug one connection before we can run a test with any confidence over which line is being used.

My position is that we pay them a not-inconsiderable amount of money each month for a connection that would be quite at home in 2005.

Thinkbroadband monitors of our two connections look like this:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/54be14da6bb77ef435bb704d89e05aa3.html

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/8009b686f1ad190e43c392d355d95e00.html

I'd appreciate any helpful information, input or opinion on the above information and graphs.

[#2]

Hi YellowBarley,

I am sorry to hear about this and the issues that you have been facing.

Have you raised these issues to our faults team at faults.plus.net ?

[#3]

We had a LOT of dealings ages ago then gave up to be honest (as an end user it definitely feels like this is the PN strategy).

I spoke to a call centre colleague a few weeks ago who told me I must log a number of BTW speedtests for each line no closer together than 2 hrs which clearly show a demonstrable fault before PN will take it seriously or accept that we even have a performance issue.  That put me off again as it simply isn't practical for the business to come to a complete standstill - over-and-above that which we already do - so that we can do the job PN should be doing.  Especially as this is an intermittent, seemingly random fault which as likely as not would not be shown by this method - again feeling like a fob-off.

It came to a head on Monday and I raised a fault request yesterday but from my experience so far and in the past it doesn't feel like we're going to get beyond the "it's your equipment/internal wiring" line.

As I see it the key issues are that we're quite a way from our cabinet at c.1.3miles, we're a business and we have a relatively complex installation.  We simply can't do what PN say they require to investigate a fault of this nature and PN can't fix something they can't investigate.

[#4]

Hello @YellowBarley - I don't know if this will help you as I'm unfamiliar with your router, but I have a similar configuration to yourself but on Fibre (but was ADSL before upgrade), but I use DrayTek Modems and Router. This router allows me to direct traffic out of a specific WAN which is very useful for the situation you find yourself in regarding speed test requirements, so maybe your Netgear can do the same.

Just a thought.

[#5]

OK so with this have you been through everything with our business support team? Also do you have the ticket reference number for your fault?

[#6]

@Anonymous - yes we can direct traffic to an extent but only according to the port so it isn't really granular enough to specify individual speed test routes

@BenB - well, we've had a bit of back and fore some time ago.  Then more recently a phonecall (with the advice to do something very disruptive and completely impractical daily and for a number of days).  Yesterday I raised a support ticket - #127180668.  Other than that, no discussion has been had.  We were originally advised by an Openreach engineer to "give up mate, just live with it, they'll never find an intermittent fault" back when we were trying to get the fibre working properly.  We've tried living with it but it just isn't feasible now.

[#7]

So, this is still happening.  Todays BTW stats are, erm, interesting.  But at least the PN faults team say everything is just hunkydory.  So that's good.