Help needed from plusnet please

[#1]

I'd love nothing more than to provision you on the closer cabinet.

Sadly, it's not directly within our control I'm afraid.

I'll be happy to arrange an engineer visit to see if it's possible.

But there is the possibility of the engineer simply signing the job off as no fault found, incurring a call-out charge. In addition, as I've mentioned above if it's a phone line routing issue then from experience I've had little success with that.

[#2]

Is there no one at Plusnet who can ask Openreach about this?

[#3]

@Gandalf It isn't a closer cabinet it's an additional FTTC cabinet on the same PCP so there is no phone line routing issue, that will not change. The OP wants to change to the new FTTC cab, this can be done but it is a bit hit and miss. If the existing FTTC cab is full an additional line may use the new cab for the fibre connection but it a bit of a risk. Have you any suggestions as to how this could be achieved?

[#4]

Surely this cannot be progressed until it's known that the additional capacity has been brought online - which could be months away. Any attempt to move now will fail and waste peoples time - and potentially their goodwill.

Brian

[#5]

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@npr wrote:

For many years I've suffered very low upstream sync speeds (often down at 0.5Mbps) This is mainly caused by aluminium cables and a ECI roadside cabinet.

If the two cabinets are co-located surely you will still have the same length of aluminium cable in circuit? Also do you know if BT have enabled G Inp on the upstream data? I seem to remember reading that it is only used on downstream.

Are you sure that this is worth it?

[#6]

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@npr wrote:

Is there no one at Plusnet who can ask Openreach about this?

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Not that I'm aware of. One of my colleagues @bobpullen tried to help on a similar issue not long ago with little joy.

Cheers for the clarification @RealAleMadrid

I'll be honest (as always) and say I'm not 100% sure of the process (if we even have one) in these situations.

I'd imagine it's similar to reproviding a circuit onto a closer cabinet, that our suppliers BT Wholesale would generally only pass something like this to their cease and reprovide team if advised by an engineer on their notes.

Surely this cannot be progressed until it's known that the additional capacity has been brought online - which could be months away. Any attempt to move now will fail and waste peoples time - and potentially their goodwill. 

That's a good point.

If the two cabinets are co-located surely you will still have the same length of aluminium cable in circuit? 

That's what I'm thinking now too. If the new cabinet is the same distance to your property as the existing one, you might not see much of an increase in speed anyway.

It might be worth checking the Openreach site periodically as if you notice the status change to engineering work activity, there may be live to live migration planned. Though it's not something we can initiate from our end.

[#7]

Even if the aluminium length is the same, if one cabinet is ECI and the other Huawei there may well be a benefit.

[#8]

Id second what baldrick1 has said. If they near each other you won't see a difference. Only way is move closer to the cabs im afraid.

Id wish openreach would put a cab near to the peeps who are far from it. Doesn't look like it's going to happen very soon.

[#9]

jelv wrote:

Even if the aluminium length is the same, if one cabinet is ECI and the other Huawei there may well be a benefit.


You may be right slightly faster download and upload

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/01/bts-huawei-cabinets-deliver-vdsl-fibre-broadband-speed...

[#10]

If the modem is capable a Huawei cab can apply g.inp to upstream!

[#11]

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@Gandalf wrote:

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If the two cabinets are co-located surely you will still have the same length of aluminium cable in circuit? 

That's what I'm thinking now too. If the new cabinet is the same distance to your property as the existing one, you might not see much of an increase in speed anyway.

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Not only the same distance, it would still be the same line but I do have the following reasons to be optimistic.

There is some, unconfirmed, reports that Huawei are faster especially so on the upstream. G.inp would be nice, when it was briefly enabled on the ECI cabinet I got something like 2Mbps downstream increase. The fact that Huawei cabinets can enable g.inp on the upstream may or may not give additional benefits.

Three years ago,  BTOR changed my line pair which gave a increase to around 2.2Mbps upstream. This lasted for about a year then it dropped over night to around 0.5 to 0.8 Mbps, this coincided  with a change in the cabinets firmware as reported by my router stats. Downstream sync stayed the same around 24Mbps.

Note: the firmware version (IFTN:0xd086) running on this cabinet is not very common (try a google search).

This leaves me to strongly suspect the cabinet firmware is under performing for upstream.

[#12]

To clarify my mention up there ^
The issue I tried helping with was where a planned, Openreach-initiated migration of a customer's circuit from one cabinet to another was:
a) Not known to us, where we would normally have been notified.
b) Exhibiting characteristics that contradicted what we were told to expect ie. a cabinet showing FTTC availability, having that availability removed for longer than a two week period.
It was not a customer-initiated request to move between cabinets, and neither do I know of a defined process for such a thing.