Ongoing speed issues with Plusnet and Openreach need help!

[#1]

I live quite rural and am more than aware of BT, openreach and telecoms procedures up to a point.  I am a senior IT person with a large corporate entity that has to deal with communications problems every day around our sites.

But this is about my home connection. 

Originally we got circa 3mb/s on old DSL.  Over the moon when FTTC got activated and our speeds went up to around 16mb/s, despite being a LONG way from the exchange. This was with SKy.  We moved to plus net when I got a second line installed to allow everyone in the house get fair crack at bandwidth, having young family and being a foster carer.

Then one day app 14 months ago our connections died, major fault in our local little area found. 

Turns out despite the main line begin 5 yards from my house on the A91 the local line was routed another 800 yard through next doors caravan site before coming back to us.

Joy of joys!  The engineers who had spent days working on this and traffic management sorted that out.. wow we now getting 30 mb/s and we rejoiced and cancelled the second line.

4 months later though it dropped to 15mb/s.  I called plusnet to be told the profile on my line was 16.8 - basically tough.  That's what we think you should get so tough deal with it!

Not nice.  The speeds continued to drop and slowly dragged down to around 9mb/s. several calls and net chats, with zero help.

Then joy of joys, dslchecker said I should be getting min 39Mb/s  Surely they had activated cabinet 7 on balmullo?  which meant my connection would suddenly be all ok upon upgrading my account.  I immediately did of course.

come the activation date of the 18th and nothing had changed, despite being told that the changeover happened at 8.32am that morning, witness by me watching the plus net hub reboot!


Since then I have had two engineers out and told me without major traffic management there is nothing they can do.  This is in regard to the activation of cab 7 on the balmullo exchange which is a power issue I believe. But it does not explain why my current speeds have halved and why can't it now be fixed so at least that is possible?

I have one more of my three engineers to visit after today.... 

Please someone please get something fixed!

[#2]

Thanks for reaching out,

I'm sorry to see your speeds have dropped.

Based on what you've said and the engineer notes, I've checked an Openreach application called Enhanced Line Characteristics(ELC) which DSL Checker draws the results from, and it looks like their systems updated a little too early to reflect your line on the closer cabinet 7 as the engineer has said power is still being connected to it.

"PCP Id: 7

Range A

Top Downstream Bandwidth: 70.55Mbit/s

Top Upstream Bandwidth: 17.86Mbit/s

Bottom Downstream Bandwidth: 48.58Mbit/s

Bottom Upstream Bandwidth: 11.4Mbit/s

Downstream Handback Threshold: 42.87Mbit/s

Base Upstream Bandwidth: 9.7Mbit/s"

As your speed estimates before this updated looks like it were between 12mbps to 24mbps due to your line being over a mile long to the cabinet 1 you're currently on, I'd reckon we'd struggle to get our suppliers to investigate the fault further even though I understand you've said you've had higher. As it stands your speeds are within Openreach's expectations.

Testing your line is showing your speeds higher than back in May with no banding/speed restrictions:

GEA Test Detail
Circuit ID	NA	Service ID	[redacted]

Test Outcome	Pass
Test Outcome Code	GTC_FTTC_SERVICE_0000
Description	GEA service test completed and no fault found .
Main Fault Location	OK
Sync Status	In Sync
Downstream Speed	20.3 Mbps
Upstream Speed	1.2 Mbps
Appointment Required	N
Fault Report Advised	N
NTE Power Status	PowerOn
Voice Line Test Result	Pass
Bridge Tap	Not Detected
Radio Frequency Ingress	Not Detected
Repetitive Electrical Impulse Noise	Not Detected
Cross Talk	Not Detected
Estimated Line Length In Metres	1695.3
Upstream Rate Assessment	Very Good
Downstream Rate Assessment	Very Good
Interference Pattern	Not Detected
Service Impact	No Impact Observed
Home Wiring Problem	Not Detected
Technology	VDSL
Profile Name	0.128M-80M Downstream 5dB, Retransmission High - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Error Protection Off
Time Stamp	2019-06-24T10:15:00

Parameters	MIN	MAX	AVG
Down Stream Line Rate	21.2 Mbps	21.2 Mbps	21.2 Mbps
Up Stream Line Rate	1.1 Mbps	1.1 Mbps	1.1 Mbps
Up Time	900.0 Sec	900.0 Sec	900.0 Sec
Retrains	0.0	0.0	0.0

Current and Last 15 Minute Bin Performance
Parameters	Last Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins)	Current Traffic Count(Upto 15 mins)
Start Time Stamp	2019-06-24T13:25:09Z	2019-06-24T13:40:09Z
Ingress Code Violation	0	0
Egress Code Violation	14	24
Errored Seconds	3	3
Severely Errored Seconds	0	0
Unavailable Seconds	0	0

While I'm happy to arrange another engineer visit escalating this with Openreach, I'd like to first find out when cabinet 7 will be live, because if it's imminent it may be worth holding out for that.

I've therefore submitted a formwize to the Openreach fibre enquiries advising that engineers have said your line runs through both cabinet 1 and 7, your fibre service provided off cabinet 1 asking them for a timeframe when cabinet 7 will be up and running. Once this happens, we should be able to request your fibre is ceased and reprovide onto the closer one.

I've moved your fault ticket 191286906 into my workflow so I'll follow up as soon as I know more which I'd expect should be within the next 3 working days.

[#3]

Welcome addition to the fight for power at cabinet 7!

[#4]

Second engineer visit, has phoned round , seems the traffic management for A91 may be holding up the repairs/power activation,  Its a busy road!  Although speeds creeped to 20mb/s which is a huge improvement. The crackle on our phone line is gone, didnt report that before as we never use the house phone.

Still way below what should be available, but I can dream

[#5]

Thanks for the update, that looks promising.

We've not received anything back since Monday so it's likely Openreach are progressing things in the background.