Phone noise, routers and microfilters

AndyPix

Glad you got sorted mate

mgfvvc

Yesterday Zen closed the fault, as everything seemed to be hunky dory. Today the phone is hissing and crackling and the modem is racking up thousands of CRC errors per hour

kwikbreaks

I'm guessing you probably had torrential rain as we did and that has revealed a problem with waterproofing in a joint.

As I mentioned in post #2 when I had this problem my fault wasn't fixed after 5 visits from the blokes with muddy boots.

Try the BT speed / line test again - with luck it will show a fault and save any arguing although I believe Zen support is good anyway.

mgfvvc

kwikbreaks wrote: »

I'm guessing you probably had torrential rain as we did and that has revealed a problem with waterproofing in a joint.

By the time the Openreach guy showed up on Tuesday it was fine. All tests passed with flying colours. I'm guessing it was water, as you suggested, and it has now dried out. I wonder how it will fare in the next downpour?

GunJack

mgfvvc wrote: »

By the time the Openreach guy showed up on Tuesday it was fine. All tests passed with flying colours. I'm guessing it was water, as you suggested, and it has now dried out. I wonder how it will fare in the next downpour?

as soon as it manifests itself again, tell them it's only when it rains it happens..the trouble is the joints will corrode more quickly with the wet/dry cycles, mightn't be too long before it's totally borked... hi-res fault in the making

kwikbreaks

Unfortunately it will probably do the same again. If it corrodes badly enough you'll probably be back to almost constant noise when the router is powered up.

As I mentioned before I made 5 call outs for noise on voice and each engineer supposedly did something. The first replaced the drop cable and I saw that done. The others either claimed to have remade joints or swapped a circuit segment to a fresh pair. The trouble with mine was that the noise was a bit intermittent so it wasn't possible to be certain that it hadn't been fixed. The last of the engineers spotted that the noise was only present with the router on and said I'd have to go through my ISP as he didn't have the correct test equipment to locate the faulty joint but ADSL engineers would.

When the ISP changed my default noise margin to some enormous level halving the already low speed for what the line length should allow and then sent a replacement router to my old address I gave up and went to cable as they clearly had no clue.

Back on a BT line now though. Choosing my words carefully it's now FTTC which cuts out a lot of joints for the broadband path. Even so it has had one episode of problems which a callout fixed first time. I no longer use the line for voice at all having swapped to VOIP while I was on cable.

mgfvvc

A bit of drizzle today and it's all gone to pot again. I need to get an engineer here when it's wet.

mgfvvc

I have Openreach coming again tomorrow.

All last week the phone was noisy and the broadband was slow. From Sunday it was back to working well, quiet phone and 12Mbps down, so this afternoon Zen wanted to cancel with Openreach because there was no issue for them to find. Fortunately it was too late to cancel the visit, as between 5:30 and 6:00 the rain arrived and between 5:30 and 6:00 my internet collapsed in a heap.

It's now more or less stable at 2.5Mbps and the crackly phone line is back, so I am hopeful that the fault will be found tomorrow.

maddogb

hehe I've seen this so many times openreach are a joke when it comes to fixing these sorts of problems.
do you know how far away your nearest junction box is?

mgfvvc

I don't know about the junction box. We are only about half a mile from the exchange and on Wednesday the Openreach guy said he'd replaced the line all the way to the exchange!

So far, so good, but it hasn't rained since then.