Fibre connection disconnects 1-3 times per day

[#1]

I'm still experiencing the same problems with my connection, and haven't got very far with Plusnet yet. An engineer was meant to be booked for me, but I waited in and no one came and it seems like it was never booked at all. They're looking into what happened with that at the moment...
This is the latest graph of my connection drops - I count more than 40 in just over a month, and that still seems like an awful lot to me to be described as normal and stable by the faults department.

[#2]

Can you respond to the ticket on the portal please? That will then go back to faults to take another look for you.
Faults had thought the connection was sorted hence it was sent back to you. Please note that some of the drops shown will be us testing your line.
I can't see when you were told of an engineer been booked or confirmed.

[#3]

The Faults team aren't interested - they just keep telling me that my connection is stable, because they regard anything fewer than four drops per day as normal. That's the reason that I started this thread if you read my original post, because I don't consider up to three drops per day as acceptable and I wanted to know what other people thought about it or if anyone else is experiencing the same. And as you can see in the ticket, I've made my position quite clear to Faults - I don't want them just to run another test showing 40 connection drops then tell me that they consider the connection stable and the matter resolved.
If you look at the posts earlier in this thread one of your colleagues Matthew Wheeler was trying to arrange an engineer visit for me, which he was doing via private forum messages to me. He offered me a day and slot which I said was fine, but then I don't think it was booked in because he didn't confirm he'd done it, no engineer came, and I think he has been on leave since then and I haven't heard anything back.

[#4]

OH right .... that makes more sense. I'll give him a prod and see what's he's doing.
I apologise on behalf of the faults team BTW.

[#5]

I've had a visit from an engineer now, and he found a few things about my installation that he said the original BT Openreach engineer had cut corners on - there was corrosion inside my master socket, but he'd only replaced the front plastic panel not the whole thing, and some of the wiring where the line enters the building was old. The new engineer has fixed both of those for me, and I've been trying to see if that's made any difference for the last week. I'm not certain that it has though.
I wondered if a staff member could post a recent connection graph for me? I'm keen to see if there has been any improvement in stability.
Unfortunately the ticket I had open with Plusnet has now closed itself automatically because I hadn't replied to it for 14 days. It's a bit annoying that you don't have the option to re-open a ticket when that happens, as I don't consider this resolved yet.

[#6]

Glad to hear that he managed to find some issues.
Unfortunately the connection is still dropping although now it appears to be in the early hours of the morning rather then the evening

This could potentially be maintenance although there are more drops then I'd like.
It may be worth monitoring for a couple of more days to see if the issue continues.

[#7]

Hi,
My connection is still dropping quite a lot, so I don't know if anything the engineer changed actually had any effect. We had quite a long outage yesterday evening where it just wouldn't get back online. If possible could a new connection graph be posted so I can check what the frequency of them is like now?
When the engineer came one of the things he mentioned was that he found it odd that I am on a 40Mbps fibre package, but my line still tests as 80Mbps. He found this unusual, as the speed hadn't been limited on the line (which he said was the normal way to do it) and must therefore be being limited at the Plusnet end in some way. He seemed to suggest that this might cause some instability, as the line tries to pass information down at the higher speed but it isn't forthcoming from the other end. Does anyone know if that sounds likely to cause problems?
I've still got 11 months left on my contract and I'm starting to seriously regret having agreed to upgrade to fibre optic, as we've had nothing but problems since we did.
Thanks for any comments or advice,
Simon

[#8]

Quote from: superlative

When the engineer came one of the things he mentioned was that he found it odd that I am on a 40Mbps fibre package, but my line still tests as 80Mbps. He found this unusual, as the speed hadn't been limited on the line (which he said was the normal way to do it) and must therefore be being limited at the Plusnet end in some way. He seemed to suggest that this might cause some instability, as the line tries to pass information down at the higher speed but it isn't forthcoming from the other end. Does anyone know if that sounds likely to cause problems?

One of the current packages offered by Plusnet has 40/20 speeds; the only way this can be achieved is for PN to order the 80/20 package with Openreach (via BT Wholesale), but then using Plusnet's own routers to limit the downstream speed to 40Mbps. Your FTTC connection then syncs as fast as it can (within the 80/20 caps), but you only ever get to see throughput as though it were synced at 40/20.
It won't cause any instability.

[#9]

Hi all,
Just in case anyone reads this who is having similar problems to the ones I've described, I wanted to say that I think I've finally got this resolved now.
We had a second engineer visit, this time from a 'boost engineer', which seems to be a more specialist trouble-shooter kind of engineer. He checked our line more thoroughly and came up with a couple of things. Firstly, he undid some of the work the previous engineer had done, saying the changes he made were weird and that he had just 'torn wires out'. Then when he tested the line he decided the other engineer hadn't done the tests properly because he found a fault which should have been picked up. He did something to resolve that, and then reset the line at the cabinet.
It's been three weeks since he came now and my connection has been much, much more stable. It still drops very occasionally, but I don't expect it never to drop at all. It's online for several days at a time consistently now, and when it does drop it's only once and picks back up again quickly. I'm really pleased.
It seems a shame that it took so much effort to get it sorted, and that the faults team seemed so disinterested. They refused even to acknowledge that I had a problem, which just infuriated me. It was only when customer services got involved that anything was done. The faults team only seemed to care about their arbitrary measure of '4 drops per day or more', whereas customer services actually cared about whether I was satisfied with the service I was receiving. So my advice to anyone who finds themselves in the same position and can't get any joy out of the faults team is to see if customer services can help - either through these forums or via Twitter. And even if the first engineer who comes can't do anything, it may still be worth asking if they'll arrange a boost engineer to come instead.
Thanks to all who replied with advice and opinions,
Simon