SNR Reset and long dodgy rural lines

[#1]

Cheers Kev.  Just been having a read of that site, unfortunately I'm in West Wales so a bit out of the way.  Seriously. Going *anywhere* from here entails about an hour of twisty road before you get the luxury of a dual carriageway. 
Probably give kgk a shout later, if he does not mind, as before I'm just curious what reaction I'll get from any engineer visit if everything from the drop onwards has been replaced with suspiciously clean and shiny Cat5 and a new master socket.

[#2]

Evening folks. An update, and this time better news.
Just got home, and my landlady informed me that, earlier this afternoon, a BT engineer turned. He never even wanted to look inside, he was far more interested in what was outside, in particular paying an interest in the last couple of poles and the eaves of the house. He went along the road to play with his meter and, yep, the line outside is degraded, yep it needs to be replaced and the reason why?
Woodpeckers!
Woodpeckers have been attacking the line. From what I gather, one or more of the last few poles are being replaced with taller ones to keep them away from the trees, and my landlord is already planning on bribing the engineers to leave the old poles here so we can chop, split and burn them in our funky new burner.
2 weeks I think she said is the estimate for replacing such, so in the meantime I'll let things lie as they are. My thinking is now, if they'll be replacing the entire line from pole to JB in the house, I may well be able to point out the state on the internal wiring to the master and persuade them to do that lot at the same time.  If not, I'll do it myself but at least a definite culprit has been identified for now.
Woodpeckers eh.  Last time I drink a pint of their cider...

[#3]

I'm glad they've managed to find out what was causing the issue, fingers crossed they get all that swapped out ASAP.

[#4]

Quote

Woodpeckers eh

They are a big problem here in Dorset. For some reason they enjoy EATING the plastic insulation on the wire.

[#5]

Quote from: Uncle_Meat

I may well be able to point out the state on the internal wiring to the master and persuade them to do that lot at the same time.

Just make sure that how what you say cannot be misconstrued to being something which is outside of BTOR's responsibility.  INTERNAL wiring more often refers to EXTENSION wiring, which is the subscriber's responsibility.  Wiring to the NTE5 - irrespective of location or the wires being outside or inside is BTOR's responsibility.
Kevin

[#6]

I wouldn't mind, but we do encourage birds into the garden and bottom field with lots of feeders, tables, birdbaths and so on. All we need to do now is find something that tastes better to woodpeckers than BT drop wire.   I did wonder at the "taller pole" idea because, of course, woodpeckers have a maximum altitude....
@townman.  Yep, I've prepped my landlord with info for this one! Told him to point out the obviously corroded JB where the line comes into the house, point out where the master socket lives and to ask if they can renew the whole shebang whilst they're around just to keep things clean.

[#7]

Any news here?  New poles in yet?  OH / drop wire replaced yet?

[#8]

News! At last!  Been quite busy myself, personally, so not really had much chance to play internets at home.
Anyway.  Story time. Are you all sitting comfortably?  Then I'll begin.

We heard nothing else from that first engineer that came out and diagnosed birds munching away on the wire.  We waited past the 2 weeks promised and then called our landline provider to see if they could look anything up to see if there was any jobs pending for out line and nowt. Not a sausage, as far as they could tell we've never had a visit.  Strange.
Funnily enough, a couple of days after that, the landline turned to the brown stuff. Unusable at times, hours of constant crackles, then OK for a bit, then crackly again so I rang up the landline provider again on my landlords behalf and arranged for them to monitor the line. Of course, on the day I rang up it was behaving itself so a "now" test did not reveal anything but they arranged to send out another engineer in 2 days time.
They came out, found a problem with the outside drop and, for the time being at least, changed us over to a spare pair to restore service for now until they can get out to do the pole and replace the cable properly. In doing all this, they also had a look at the wiring to the master socket here and said "Ooh. That's gotta go" and are replacing that as well when they come out to do the line proper. All this was carried out last week.
In the meantime, my ADSL is now behaving itself rather well.  I've just come back to 4 and a bit days of uninterrupted sync with only a few hundred errored seconds which is quite a feat compared to getting that amount hourly.  SNR appears to be nice and stable too, with little variation.
Line stats at the mo, 65db, 13db SNR and sync of 1152 with RCO of 2500 or thereabouts on fast path. I assume I'm still banded in the >1152 band looking that those stats?
Now, a question. How long will it take for DLM to perk me back up again? I've just resynced after seeing that 4 days continuous hoping it might spring up to a higher rate but nope.  Also, can this be manually reset or would I be best waiting for BT to finish off with those loose ends?

[#9]

Hi Uncle_Meat,
I had been wondering how things were at woodpecker farm!
SNRM reset / banding removal will require a splash of DCT magic.
Kevin

[#10]

Hey there!
I was just composing a reply and the connection dropped for 2 mins. Came back up at previous stats mind, but almost drove me into a "Typical! 4 days at least with no drops and then....." self-rant..
All busy here, inbetween my usual running around and my landlord having an op on his knee, so I've been busier than usual on my days off doing odds & sods around here, I've hardly had time to internet at all.  Still, I've got a rare "the rest of the day to myself" today so the plan is to drink gallons of tea and watch MST3K on the telly.

I wonder if it's worth resetting at the moment, as will BT eventually replacing the drop to the socket upset it? Hopefully it'll just be seen as a blip and no harm done, but I'm sure others will be better informed as to what happens than I.

[#11]

Hi Uncle_Meat,
Glad to hear that things seem to be moving on and you're getting a bit more stability on the line.
I've taken a check through the details on the account and run through a quick fault check to see what we can see now that the line issues have had some attention and it looks as though the testing is still reporting possible line degradation which could be affecting the service. Before we start looking at running through the checks and raising this as a fault I think it would be best to try a quick SNR reset to see what we can get.
You should see some movement within the next 4 hours, if you can let us know how you get on and we'll see what the next step will be  

EDIT
The drop will no doubt have been me running the intrusive faults testing, sorry about that  

[#12]

Ah-haa.. So that was your fault.     At least we know what caused that drop, I was thinking I was cursed for a moment then.

Anyway, it's just dropped and reconnected at 2163kbps.  Attn 64db, SNR 6.5 at the mo, RCO 2916 and still fast path.  Sweet!  I'll leave Routerstats going in the background for the rest of the day and overnight if I can, see if I can spot anything from there.  I take it will be a certain amount of time before my IP profile catches up with sync?

As for the line still showing potential errors, as above there is still a few odds and ends for BT to finish off, namely replacing the pole/drop and associated wiring all the way to a new master socket so once that's finished, hopefully that'll be that.
Ta for that, if anything flakes out I'll let you folks know.

[#13]

Good stuff, looks like we got a decent jump out of the SNR reset then!
I've manually altered your profile on our side for you now and with the sync rate sitting at 2163 it gives you a profile of 1900mbps. You should see this throughput now and hopefully we'll see you sit stable over the course of the evening while you monitor the connection.
Keep us updated 

[#14]

Ta for that.  I tried dropping and reconnecting the session earlier today, but no change in IP profile so I've just rebooted the router and it appears I'm still on a 1Mb IP profile.
Anyway, apart from that, all stable so far. SNR is hovering at around 6db so far, maybe a .2 +/- deviation and so far so good.

[#15]

Hi Uncle_Meat,
IIRC you are on ADLS on 20CN - see http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/speed_guide/broadband_terminology.shtml#dlm
I think that I'm right in suggesting it could take the BTOR equipment up to 3 days to sort out your new profile.  If you were on a 21CN service, it would update immediately after a resynch on BTOR systems and sometime later on on PN's systems.
Kevin