Our BB dilemma

clairet707

We have been with O2 now for about 3 years, we moved back in May and moved from an access area to standard LLU BB area so we thought great, faster speeds and no throttling..

Or so we thought..

For the past 4 months or so our BB speed in the evenings has been about 1Mb max, with most of the time it being under that. Its virtually unusable

Weve had the Openreach engineer out twice to check the line (only installed begin June), all clear. Ive phoned O2 almost every other night, and certainly at least once a week, most of the time its great speeds (of around 4.5Mb during the day) but evenings and weekends we can barely use it.

O2 have sent us a new router (ours was an old O2 one) no change, they have asked me to switch between master socket and normal, wireless and wired, changed the channels and other settings at their end with no luck. The past few days they have been monitoring the line to check the speeds. Yesterday morning I managed to download the new TT album in about 5 minutes this morning I was getting speeds of about 0.8Mb

I dont know what theyve done but its worse than useless so now we are going to complain properly and say we want to get out of our contract

We are going to virgin cable BB (the road is enabled and the previous residents had virgin installed so it should be relatively easy), the only thing is I want to keep our PO phone line - can we do that on Virgin cable?

penrhyn

Have not heard the term PO phone line for a while, of course you can keep your BT land line for phone calls.
The Virgin system is completely separate, whether you can get a decent deal for broadband only with Virgin cable is another issue.
Can you keep the same number if you move your phone calls to Virgin cable - no.

If you want, post your router line statistics and we may be able to advise.

clairet707

penrhyn wrote: »

Have not heard the term PO phone line for a while, of course you can keep your BT land line for phone calls.
The Virgin system is completely separate, whether you can get a decent deal for broadband only with Virgin cable is another issue.
Can you keep the same number if you move your phone calls to Virgin cable - no.

If you want, post your router line statistics and we may be able to advise.

Thanks

Our calls are cheap from the PO (and that is the PO not BT) so we will stick with that and that means we can keep the number

I think my husband just wants useable internet at the moment and is willing to pay virgin for BB only - annoyingly we are only paying £5 a month for O2 so that will put our bills up..

I am at work at the moment so will attempt to try and post the stats later (assuming the bb works) - where do I go to get the stats?

macman

Router stats:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php#34.
You may pay your line rental to the PO, but it's still a BT line-penrhyn was using that term to distinguish it from the separate VM cable network.
But continuing to pay BT line rental and calls and taking VM broadband without a phone service is going to be expensive, as VM give very little discount for not having the phone as well (although their telephony is the most expensive around).

penrhyn

I'm getting old, I still remember Post Office Telecomms, before BT and had forgotten the recent incarnation.



Line stats, they can be obtained from your router, how to log in depends on the manufacturer.

Kitz lists a few of the popular ones here.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

Might give an idea of whats going on.

clairet707

macman wrote: »

Router stats:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php#34.
You may pay your line rental to the PO, but it's still a BT line-penrhyn was using that term to distinguish it from the separate VM cable network.
But continuing to pay BT line rental and calls and taking VM broadband without a phone service is going to be expensive, as VM give very little discount for not having the phone as well (although their telephony is the most expensive around).

But Im not paying BT line rental or call prices - My phone is £12 a month with evening and weekends, calls to mobiles are free at weekends, as are 0845 / 0870 numbers.. Our average bill isnt any more than the line rental

So to get the same package on virgin its going to be 12.24 for the phone line, plus the evening and weekend package plus the talk mobile package plus the bb which brings it to about £30. And we probably would be charged more for the calls we do make

Sticking with PO and using Virgin BB is £32

Im not sure thats enough of a difference to make me change our phone line to virgin, (its bad enough for me to go to virgin at all - their reputation is putting me off a lot)

clairet707

Ive tried getting the settings off our router but its not letting me log in as a superuser, I can log in as an administrator though (is that different)

clairet707

Right, it has finally let me log on as superuser and Ive got the stats

Link Information




Uptime:0 days, 0:20:50 DSL Type:G.992.5 annex A Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:893 / 4,261 Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [kB/kB]:0.00 / 0.00 Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]:12.0 / 19.0 Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]:24.5 / 46.0 SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]:15.0 / 15.5 Vendor ID (Local/Remote)MMB / BDCM Loss of Framing (Local/Remote):0 / 0 Loss of Signal (Local/Remote):0 / 0 Loss of Power (Local/Remote):0 / 0 Loss of Link (Remote):0 Error Seconds (Local/Remote):0 / 0 FEC Errors (Up/Down):0 / 0 CRC Errors (Up/Down):0 / 0 HEC Errors (Up/Down):180 / 0

clairet707

Uptime:0 days, 0:20:50
DSL Type:G.992.5 annex A
Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]:893 / 4,261
Data Transferred (Sent/Received) [kB/kB]:0.00 / 0.00
Output Power (Up/Down) [dBm]:12.0 / 19.0
Line Attenuation (Up/Down) [dB]:24.5 / 46.0
SN Margin (Up/Down) [dB]:15.0 / 15.5
Vendor ID (Local/Remote): TMMB / BDCM
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote):0 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote):0 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote):0 / 0
Loss of Link (Remote):0
Error Seconds (Local/Remote):0 / 0
FEC Errors (Up/Down):0 / 0
CRC Errors (Up/Down):0 / 0
HEC Errors (Up/Down):180 / 0

penrhyn

Your download sync speed is 4.261 Mbps, Line attenuation is 46 db and the noise margin is 15.5db.
With 46db attenuation you should normally expect around 8Mbps, however it looks like your ISP has capped the speed maybe due to noise on the line in the past.
The reason i suspect this is that the router will try and sync with a noise margin of around 7db, the lower the number the faster the sync speed.

Try taking stats again when you experience low throughput to see if the router has reset itself at a lower rate, although I doubt it.

macman

penrhyn, please could you outline how you reach the anticipated Mbps figure from the attenuation and noise margin figures please?
Never quite worked out the relationship between them.