Fibre has slowed

[#1]

Hi,
my FTTC line has slowed from 76/16 to 44/13. This may be due to loose connections internally, as I was experiencing terrible drop out on vDSL (8 times in an hour) and low speeds (19/8)  and crackling on the POTS. I went and pushed everything back in and lo and behold instantly went to 40/12.
I would point out that I was on Infinity 2 at 76/16 for 2.5 years, and moved to plus.net in late March.Naturally I tested on switching and got identical speeds. The local box is at the foot of my garden so I get pretty good speeds (I even have to trim my hedge around it) :).
Can anyone check the "banding" on my line and find out if I've dropped and DLM should make it come back up? Or is it enough that I should report it as a fault. I note that there is scheduled maintenance for Glasgow West for 9th July (though whether that's tonight or last night is not clear. Will that cause a retrain?
I did the whole BT speed test thing but could never do TAP3 as it said the server was busy (I did set DNS to automatic in case it was an issue there)
Oh and was it just me but I couldn't register on the forums yesterday, kept hanging.
Cheers

[#2]

Quote

as I was experiencing terrible drop out on vDSL (8 times in an hour) and low speeds (19/8)  and crackling on the POTS. I went and pushed everything back in and lo and behold instantly went to 40/12.

Was this on the 7th?
Has the crackling stopped now too?

Your line is now in sync at:
Downstream Speed 73.9 Mbps
Upstream Speed 20.0 Mbps
Profile Name 0.128M-80M Downstream, Retransmission Low - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Error Protection Off

[#3]

Fab!
Yup the 7th, I mostly fixed the crackling, but I still get a little. I've been in and out so not had a chance to get totally to the bottom of it. It went when I firmed everything up, but there's still a low level.
Speed is now 47/14 so its getting back up there. Is that the Openreach modem reducing the speed, or perhaps unable to sustain it. I was using speedtest.net rather than BT's  as it a bit tedious to fiddle with my router's settings all the time (ClearOS, linux based router running as a VM under VMware (vsphere))
I'll look at it again this weekend and see if I can track down the problem, I'm pretty sure its at my end, but wanted to check there was nothing funny caused by Tuesday's misbehaviour
Thanks for checking. I really appreciate it.

[#4]

Try it again now?