I'm sort of back on line, at last.
At long last after around 11 days we have FTTC restored and sort of working, I’ll explain the ‘sort of working’ as this post progresses but first here is some advice for anyone thinking of having fibre installed.
Before you even think of having fibre installed check you can receive a good mobile internet signal, if you only have G or Edge you will have a very hard time doing anything online, a 2.5 or 3G is the minimum for using your phone tethered.
Why do you need this, well unlike ADSL which we could always get working even if the phone line was bad, with FTTC it either works or it doesn’t and doing any kind of on-line stuff is a nightmare without a good mobile line speed, and check when tethered it does actually connect to the internet all our phones didn’t.
Having been with Plusnet from the time it was Force9 and a fledgling company and on ADSL fixed lines I am rather paranoid about line stats etc so have always had monitors on my line. So it was no real surprise last Sunday the 23rd when our DSL failed and we were off line. What was a surprise was the difficulty it would take to get it fixed.
Openreach was scheduled to do the repair on Thursday the 27th, as I posted in another thread everything went well and the guy thought it was fixed. That evening it failed again, and was off and on all day Friday then failed completely just in time for the wettest Bank Holiday weekend we have had this year.
Openreach was then re-scheduled to do the repair yesterday morning, however just after lunchtime on Wednesday the DSL light came back on on the ECI modem and being the nosy git I am I took a walk round the corner to see if anyone was working on (in) our cabinet.
I find two Openreach vans complete with engineers, all the cabinet doors open and stuff everywhere. On politely asking if they had fixed my fibre I was told sorry not on their list but with all the problems in the cabinet it might be inadvertently fixed as they were re-setting a load of ports (due to possible damage?).
So Thursday comes and no engineer turns up, I phone support (I think nearly 3 hours of musak, not all at once but over many calls, is enough for this year LOL), I find, yes the engineers from Wednesday had reported the fault as cleared and closed the job, nice of them to tell me.
And we are back on line, speed is way down but with G.inp off, interleaving at huge levels and a still wobbly connection, I am leaving the ECI modem connected just in case it fails again. I did connect the Billion 8800NL for a short time but the statistics it returned to DSLStats were so weird I went back to the ECI to see if it will stabilise over the weekend.
The initial stats returned from the Billion, note line 😧 which I believe is the interleave depth and the SNR which is nearly the same both up and down;
Max: Upstream rate = 16545 Kbps, Downstream rate = 76302 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 13131 Kbps, Downstream rate = 59551 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: VDSL2 Annex B
VDSL2 Profile: Profile 17a
TPS-TC: PTM Mode(0x0)
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 6.4 6.2
Attn(dB): 9.9 0.0
Pwr(dBm): 13.4 -5.6
VDSL2 framing
Bearer 0
MSGc: 19 19
B: 38 37
M: 1 1
T: 64 64
R: 12 14
S: 0.0208 0.0921
L: 19584 4519
😧 1636 323
I: 51 52
N: 51 52
All tests done last night by Plusnet say there is nothing wrong and both FTTC and the phone line is fine, we shall see.
I'll be back
if anything else crops up, regards, P.
Before you even think of having fibre installed check you can receive a good mobile internet signal, if you only have G or Edge you will have a very hard time doing anything online, a 2.5 or 3G is the minimum for using your phone tethered.
Why do you need this, well unlike ADSL which we could always get working even if the phone line was bad, with FTTC it either works or it doesn’t and doing any kind of on-line stuff is a nightmare without a good mobile line speed, and check when tethered it does actually connect to the internet all our phones didn’t.
Having been with Plusnet from the time it was Force9 and a fledgling company and on ADSL fixed lines I am rather paranoid about line stats etc so have always had monitors on my line. So it was no real surprise last Sunday the 23rd when our DSL failed and we were off line. What was a surprise was the difficulty it would take to get it fixed.
Openreach was scheduled to do the repair on Thursday the 27th, as I posted in another thread everything went well and the guy thought it was fixed. That evening it failed again, and was off and on all day Friday then failed completely just in time for the wettest Bank Holiday weekend we have had this year.
Openreach was then re-scheduled to do the repair yesterday morning, however just after lunchtime on Wednesday the DSL light came back on on the ECI modem and being the nosy git I am I took a walk round the corner to see if anyone was working on (in) our cabinet.
I find two Openreach vans complete with engineers, all the cabinet doors open and stuff everywhere. On politely asking if they had fixed my fibre I was told sorry not on their list but with all the problems in the cabinet it might be inadvertently fixed as they were re-setting a load of ports (due to possible damage?).
So Thursday comes and no engineer turns up, I phone support (I think nearly 3 hours of musak, not all at once but over many calls, is enough for this year LOL), I find, yes the engineers from Wednesday had reported the fault as cleared and closed the job, nice of them to tell me.
And we are back on line, speed is way down but with G.inp off, interleaving at huge levels and a still wobbly connection, I am leaving the ECI modem connected just in case it fails again. I did connect the Billion 8800NL for a short time but the statistics it returned to DSLStats were so weird I went back to the ECI to see if it will stabilise over the weekend.
The initial stats returned from the Billion, note line 😧 which I believe is the interleave depth and the SNR which is nearly the same both up and down;
Max: Upstream rate = 16545 Kbps, Downstream rate = 76302 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 13131 Kbps, Downstream rate = 59551 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: VDSL2 Annex B
VDSL2 Profile: Profile 17a
TPS-TC: PTM Mode(0x0)
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 6.4 6.2
Attn(dB): 9.9 0.0
Pwr(dBm): 13.4 -5.6
VDSL2 framing
Bearer 0
MSGc: 19 19
B: 38 37
M: 1 1
T: 64 64
R: 12 14
S: 0.0208 0.0921
L: 19584 4519
😧 1636 323
I: 51 52
N: 51 52
All tests done last night by Plusnet say there is nothing wrong and both FTTC and the phone line is fine, we shall see.
I'll be back
if anything else crops up, regards, P.