Three Disconnections In Under 90 Minutes!!!!

[#1]

Three times tonight my connection has dropped!

20:47 - 3 Minutes to reconnect.

21:43 - 7 Minutes to reconnect.

22:00 - 5 Minutes to reconnect.

I had massive issues a few months ago when I was getting multiple disconnections per day, which necessitated two engineer visits withing a month, but they never totally cured the problem despite the disconnections reducing to around one per day.

That was blamed by the engineer on a section of aluminium phone line between myself and the fibre street cabinet.

But here we go again with the disconnections!

Especially annoying when a stable fibre connection is needed as our household relies predominately on streaming content, such as Netflix, Amazon Video and Xbox Live, then a flaky service is a massive headache.

I am sick of going over this with Plusnet staff and want this [-Censored-] poor connection rectified.

I have done all the tests before on several occasions (striping the NTE5 back to the test socket) and everything has been good, but something external to my property is crashing my connection on a regular basis.

My guess is that there is a major fault with the green street cabinet as I overheard the last engineer speaking to a colleague who said that for some reason he always has issues with that cabinet and that after a disconnect, it normally takes around 8-10 minutes to reconnect when it should be under 5 minutes.

I have been a Plusnet customer for over 10 years and probably nearer to 12 years and someone need to take ownership of this issue and rectify it 100% as it's doing my head in and causing me a lot of stress!

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Avoidance of swear filter edited as per Forum rules.

[#2]

Sorry to hear you're having issues.

From what I can see the disconnections seem to be all happening in the evenings:

As line tests aren't finding the cause of the problem I'd recommend raising a fault to us at http://faults.plus.net so we can pass this on to our suppliers and arrange another engineer visit to further investigate.

Apologies for the inconvenience caused.

[#3]

Moderators Note.

Moved from broadband to fibre

[#4]

I do tend to get a lot of disconnections in the evening, that is correct, but here's a weird coincidence that's been going on forever that no-one can seem to explain.

Among all the disconnections at random times, I occasionally get disconnections bang on the hour (-/+ a few seconds).

I used to think that these "On The Hour" disconnections were just a coincidence, but on checking the log again after a disconnection earlier this evening, I noticed that as well disconnections at random times over the last few weeks, I have been getting disconnections @ 22:00 quite regularly over the last week or so, but no pattern (that I can see anyway).

For instance:
13/06/18 - 22:00:17 - Internet connection cleared.
12/06/18 - 22:00:08 - Internet connection cleared.
07/06/18 - 22:00:13 - Internet connection cleared.
04/06/18 - 22:00:04 - Internet connection cleared.
 
The above disconnections are in addition to multiple other disconnections, but there must be something connected with the above, surely?

I've had "On The Hour" disconnections before, but when I complained about them last time back in April this year, they were occurring @ 7pm, 8pm and 9pm.

I painstakingly compiled a list of the times last time, which can be seen in the following thread:
https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/Fibre-Dropping-Every-Day/m-p/1530728#M74259

Could the change in times be anything to do with the clocks changing?

This has been going on since I got fibre installed several years ago, getting worse as time goes by.

Did get slightly better after the last two engineer visits, but I got the feeling they didn't have a clue what the external issue was and were clutching at straws trying to rectify the problem.

I still think it has something to do with a fault within the green street cabinet, as during the last engineer visit, I overheard the guy on the phone to the broadband engineer who was talking about issues he been aware of with the local cabinet from when it was installed a few years ago and that after a disconnection, it was taking considerably longer than it should to reconnect a dropped connection (10+ minutes on occasion).

Come on Plusnet....Do Me Proud!

[#5]

Hi @Ripperoo2018,

I'm sorry to hear that you're still experiencing these issues. Given the history of this issue, at this stage the only thing we can really do is raise another fault and arrange for an engineer to come out and investigate the issue further.

As it has been a couple of months since you last informed us of these issues though, I would like to ask a couple of questions before we arrange for this to go ahead.

Firstly, I've previously asked you if there was anything within the property or the surrounding area that may be the cause of the frequent drops in connection at these irregular hours and you had at the time said you couldn't find anything that would be obviously causing the problem, but I'd like to again ask if you've noticed anything in the meantime that lines up with the connections dropping? This doesn't necessarily mean external factors and it could well be down to something within the property that is automatically turning on around the times the connections dropping out, like a home heating system for example and I ask this again as if it is something internal that we may be able to resolve without sending an engineer round, this would be ideal given that the connection drops are happening at hours that engineer appointments are unavailable.

This also leads on to my second question, which is, before we get an engineer round, has anything in the internal setup within the property changed since you last contacted us? If so, it may be worth doing a quick run through of the troubleshooting steps again just to be safe as if the engineer does find the issue to be internal this can result in an engineer visit fee.

If you'd like to give these quick run through again the troubleshooting guides can be found here and here.

Please get back in touch with us as soon as you can so we can look into progressing the investigation further forward again as soon as possible.

[#6]

I think an engineer visit is probably best, but then it means I'll probably have to take another day off as they cannot come at specific times and I work shifts.

To answer your questions, I have not noticed anything in the meantime that would be causing these connection drops, such as home heating and nothing has changed internally since the last engineer visit.

The only other thing to mention is that engineer said he'd swapped poles as a a length of cable somewhere that was aluminium or something.  I cannot fully remember what he said to be honest, but it was something like that.

Anyhow, the connection seemed better after that for a while, but is now getting as bad as before.

Something seems to be deteriorating gradually ?

The engineer said that my cable runs south to a cabinet before running north to the green fibre cabinet 300m away and that there was a fault approx 80m away, which would be the daughter box I guess.

Could it be the cable from my house to the pole?

Could it be cable from pole to daughter box?

Could it be daughter box to green fibre cabinet?

I have done the troubleshooting trick til I'm blue in the face!

I've bought new high-end router/modems, network testing gear at considerable cost of the years and still this issue persists.

The only constant is that the connection keeps dropping randomly.

The problem is out of my control and must lie outside my property!

I even read somewhere that something on a timer in a telephone exchange was cutting out peoples internet.  Could this be the case here?

We also occasionally get poor quality voice line when we get calls.  Thought this was the other persons mobile reception, but maybe not.  Related perhaps?

[#7]

Yeah I'd recommend arranging an engineer visit to investigate this further as our tests aren't finding what the fault could be.

Let us know when you've raised the fault at http://faults.plus.net and we'll pick it up.

Apologies for the inconvenience that this causes.