Do I really have a router fault?

agrinnall

You could be right about DLM, but I would have thought BT would have been able to see if that had happened (if they bothered to look, of course).

The house will be going up for sale soon so I won't be spending any money on things that I can't take away with me, although I'd bear it in mind for a new place.

I'm not sure that rewiring would actually have any effect in my case as the main socket is an ADSL V1.0, which I understood isolated the broadband and phone connections at the point of entry into the house.

Basil1234

agrinnall wrote: »

You could be right about DLM, but I would have thought BT would have been able to see if that had happened (if they bothered to look, of course).

The house will be going up for sale soon so I won't be spending any money on things that I can't take away with me, although I'd bear it in mind for a new place.

I'm not sure that rewiring would actually have any effect in my case as the main socket is an ADSL V1.0, which I understood isolated the broadband and phone connections at the point of entry into the house.

dlm runs in the background all the time at the exchange level the mistake most people make is to kill the power to the router the dlm takes this as a failure therefore kicks it down a notch, also the first 10days is a training period.
also regard phone extensions increase line length as they are still part of the overall line length which will adjust the figures whether you jack in on the master or end of the line, like some people make the mistake of not putting filters on all their connected equipment whether phone or sky boxes etc. alot of people disconnect their extensions if you can, leave overnight resync leave a couple of hours then see if their speed jumps up to see if line length or have a faulty extension or line on their side of things this way it can be ruled out of the equation to then no their side is good.
dodgy filters can also be checked out by removed filter and equipment one at a time resync then check line stats watch when it jumps up you found a dodgy one. i had one once what a pain in the backside was upstairs right behind chest of drawers and tv and everything had to come out and the chest of drawers between a wardrobe and blanket box not fun.

anyway hope has helped
basil

kwikbreaks

The standard target noise margin is 6dB and it changes in 3dB steps. If you reboot your router and check the sync and noise margin immediately after that it should show either 6 or 9 dB noise margin. With a line as long as yours it may wel be that the DLM has set a 9dB margin to maintain stability as noise levels rise and fall (typically MW radio at night - especially so if you have a long run of overground phone line).

The usual source of noise n internal wiring is the ringwire if you have extensions. This can be removed and is discussed here

Plugin extensions are bad news as you can't remove the ring wire in them.

agrinnall

I rang BT Faults again today and this time got someone who when they ran their test diagnosed the problem as a fault in their wiring. It was passed to second level support, and they've just called me back to confirm that they also see a fault, and have passed it to Openreach with an expected resolution date of 5th April.

Interestingly the router stats have changed today, with the downstream synch back to it's normal rate but the upstream completely shot:

ADSL
Type Interleave Path
Status SHOWTIME
Downstream Upstream
Data rate(Kbps)
768Kb 64Kb
Noise Margin
8 7
Output power(dBm)
116 154
Attenuation(dB)
74 31

agrinnall

Openreach came out yesterday, ran some tests but couldn't find a fault, and checked the synch speed which was what they were expecting. I wasn't too surprised as it had felt like it was getting a bit faster earlier in the day. After they'd gone I checked the speed myself and it was still down as the IP profile hadn't gone up, but today it's all back to normal.

I think I might write to complain about the diagnosis of a faulty router, had I been more gullible I might have gone out and bought a new one for no reason.

Thanks for the suggestions and information, hopefully it'll all be OK for a few more months now.