Madasafish Questions/answers (merged threads)

disgruntled1234

I've just checked my ticket and it has been updated with the following information;


7:48pm, Monday 2nd June 2008


Broadband Fault Checker - Connection checks [ Completed ] The Connection checks could not be completed
Test result summary: Inconclusive
We have not been able to complete the checks of your broadband service. This may be the result of a fault in the testing system rather than your service.

We will continue to monitor your fault, please provide more information or further updates on the occurance of your fault. If your fault has not re-occured since our testing, please close the ticket and confirm that you are satisfied that the problem is no longer occuring.

Script User Automated Script Pool

7:49pm, Monday 2nd June 2008

Your support request has been escalated to the correct team for review.


I'm a little discouraged to see that these inconclusive results might be as a result of their testing system and that they'll continue to monitor the fault.

Is this just techno speak for "We've done all we can do and let us know if the problem continues, otherwise we'll close your ticket".

Oh well, I'll wait to see if the team that it's been escalated to has any further success!

We shall see.

oldagetraveller

I think the speeds have deteriorated over time. I'm into my 2nd 12 month contract with MAAF. After my initial sign up download speeds were consistently around 4Mb/s until BT's grubby hands got hold of MAAF. Almost overnight there was a fall to 2.5Mb/s which has gradually reduced to 1.6Mb/s now.
I did raise a fault and there was nothing wrong according to MAAF/BT, no doubt they'll eventually tell you the same.
After they said there wasn't a problem I did find a dodgy length of copper wire, in my garage, before the master socket and replaced it (yes their bit!). The BT "engineer" who visited the property missed that. This did improve things slightly for a short time unti lthey obviously realised and dropped my speed again.

disgruntled1234

Hi oldagetraveller,

I've been with MAAF since about April 2004 and I've been generally happy with the service.

I only renewed recently because Samara got me a good deal if I signed up again for another 12 months.

I too have serious misgivings about the quality of the service since MAAF was merged with BT. I even e-mailed them with my concerns at the time and they said that all existing customers would remain on the same kit and there should be no disruption.

Unfortunately, that's been far from the truth reading people's experiences on this forum (which seems to have gone very quite of late).

I'll wait and see if I get a further response from MAAF and share my tales of joy (or more likely woe!).

Regards

harryhound

I too am on my second year with MAAF, having been a broadband virgin prior to 2007. I had most of the possible misfortunes in my rural setting, getting my connection up and running.

Since inception I have been tracking my speeds using what is now called "thinkbroadband". It stores the readings and plots a graph, which is useful for
spotting degradation (or improvement) trends. It also illustrates the steps of performance that BT dishes out, based on its monitoring of your line quality.

Following a lucky accident, which meant I was operating out of the connection inside the master socket, Espresso identified my extension wiring as collecting "noise", so I had "the snip" which improved my performance by at least 1 Mbps.
(I do suffer electrical "noise" probably from my "dodgy" neighbours, who once managed to install some new "industrial" kit that repeatedly triggered my earth leakage circuit breaker!)

Today the media is having a field day quoting the "thinkbroadband" statistics and plugging the fact that London gets 4+ Mbps on average but the rest of the country gets significantly less and some people get nothing at all.

Well I'm getting 41/4 Mbps today, up a bit from a typical 3 3/4 Mbps, having averaged about 1.8 in my early days and 2 3/4 Mbps prior to "the snip".

So about 2 - 3 miles from the exchange a "London" performance seems OK to me.

However in the wet weather over the holiday weekend etc, I got several drop outs. (I have the router "hanging" out of the ceiling above an arch in the hall - so spotting a missing green light is easy BUT climbing into the loft to switch it on and off is a pain!)

I put these drop outs down to the wet and dampness getting at the system somewhere in the 2 - 3 mile journey.

I think the point I am making is that here in Britain we enjoy a pretty good broadband on the cheap. Nobody wants to invest in fibre to upgrade to a quality local loop. So we are stuck for the moment with copper wire that is exposed to all sorts of variables and requires skilled devoted (?!) BT staff to keep it up to scratch. I think there must be lots of people out there who could get a better service from the existing technology, if BT had the courage to let the genie out of the bottle BUT the prospect of a 120 GBP charge (?), if the amateur c0cks up, suppresses demand; even from those of us with the time and determination to have a go.

Harry

disgruntled1234

Hi Harry,

I hear what you're saying. I might have a look at placing the router in the hallway and connecting it up to the master socket to rule out any internal wiring.

What I can't understand is that my router is telling me that it has sync'ed at between 2000 and 2300 kbps, but when I run the MAAF speed test (or any other speed test), the download speed is always 457kpbs (almost to the digit).

It's like my download speed is being artifically "throttled".

My wife and I aren't heavy Internet users. We don't download movies, music, games, videos, etc, etc. We use maybe 5GB of data in an average month and so I doubt we're being penalised.

Like I said in my first post, absolutely nothing has changed with the set, either hardware or software, so I'm at a loss as to what might have changed, except something with the BT exchange or something with MAAF.

Regards

harryhound

Yes you have to rule out the danger that it is something to do with "stuff" attached at your side of the master socket. You must always use a "filter" to keep the phone signal away from the BB, so I check my filters from time to time, by switching them over with just the master socket in use. It is not unknown for filters to go faulty.
Your phone line should always be at least 50mm away from the electricity supply and beware of local "interference", I walked round with a transistor radio tracking down nasty sources like the front door bell and the scanner on my other computer.
Your service is being degraded for some reason, in theory down to the best speed that gives you a "reliable" signal. Though it can collapse over night it takes several days too crawl back up to speed again, so leaving just one phone and one router plugged into the master socket's internal socket if you go away for the weekend, would be an interesting exercise.

What does "samknows" think of your potential speed?

If you do an advanced search on this thread against my name, and ignore some of the "fun" postings, you should find advice from people who know what they are talking about and you could prod them with a Private Message to see if they are aware of your situation and would like to help.

To sum up it sounds like c0ck-up, conspiracy, or a really dirty intermittent problem on the line. [like the fun I had when the BT engineer told me to reconnect my external bell]

disgruntled1234

I did check on samknows and it does seem to indicate that I should be able to get about 1.5mpbs on ADSL max.

One thing which has only just struck me is that I've noticed that for the last few days I've been unable to access a couple of web sites that I always used to get to.

One is www.betterdrivingplease.com. When I try and access this at home, I either get "Page not found" or a username/password dialog window opening.

I also use www.tvtv.co.uk which is a useful onling tv guide. Again, I get random "Page not found" errors here as well.

Neither of these sites have presented a problem before.

As a test, just to rule out anything untoward on my PC, I jumped onto my Wife's PC and ran a speed test and got exactly the same download speeds.

It's almost like my traffic is being routed through some proxy which is a.) blocking access to certain sites and b.) is choking the connection speed.

I might invest in another couple of good quality filters just in case these are causing the speed issues, but I think there's more to this than simply a slow connection.

Thanks again for the info.

(Does James_PN from MAAF still monitor and update this forum?)

espresso

disgruntled1234 wrote: »

(Does James_PN from MAAF still monitor and update this forum?)

Click here and make your own mind up!

MissMuppet

Or here http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=926265

disgruntled1234

I'm going to buy a couple of new microfilters today and try and relocate my router near to the master socket and see what results I get.

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions...