Broadband dropping out regularly in the evening / morning

[iniltous]

Something switching on or off ( central heating for example ) can cause this type of thing, search for REIN/SHINE ( ADSL ) ….it doesn’t  necessarily need to be in the same home,  it could even be a neighbour.

[DavidM]

Thanks for getting back to me @nwlondon . Please let me know how the engineer visit goes. I'm happy to step in if needed.

Cheers

David

[nwlondon]

Possible, but I'm fairly sure we don't have anything that generates that level of interference running at 00:27; the heating is off and big power consumers like the dishwasher and washing machine don't run at predictable times. If the interference was outside the house it would have to be pretty high power so I'd imagine the neighbours might also have been seeing problems, but I asked and no-one's reporting any. However I have an SDR that will go down to almost DC, so I may try snooping around the sub 1MHz bands next time the DSL fails to see if anything obvious is radiating a ton of RF in my vicinity. Any idea what precise frequency DSL uses?

[Keith_Beddoe]

ADSL and VDSL spectrum.

[nwlondon]

No joy. Engineer called, tested everything in sight, but couldn't find any problems with the wiring or anything in the vicinity of the house or the pole. But the hub still loses connectivity regularly at 00:27 in the evening. Last night the technical log showed it continuing to make and drop the connection repeatedly every couple of minutes until 03:36 when it stabilised. I'm starting to think that BT have no way to diagnose this problem or fix it.   If there isn't a repeatable fault at the time the engineer calls they're flummoxed. It's not so bad losing connectivity in the middle of the night except for the fact that at 0:30 I'm usually trying to watch the last few minutes of a film before going to bed. But the problem also happens in working hours occasionally which is really annoying. 

I'm not sure what do do next. Obviously I'll report another fault if it recurs during working hours (as it probably will), but based on past experience it's not obvious that they can diagnose it. I'm planning a bit of geeky investigation over the next few days. I can use one of my SDRs as a spectrum analyser so I'll maybe attach an antenna and sniff around 0 to 10 MHz at 0:30 to see if there's anything in the vicinity radiating huge amounts of RF on VDSL-like frequencies.

I guess I might beg BT to replace the hub, but it's not obvious it's a hub problem. But if anyone has any suggestions for further self-help diagnostics (or anything else) please let me know. 

[RobbieMac · Accepted solution]

Hi @nwlondon 

Many thanks for taking the time to chat with me again this evening.

I'm sorry for the connection problems you had with your broadband recently and for the length of time this has been going on.  I am really pleased to have been able to help resolve everything and from checking from my side, things have been much more stable over the last few days.

I'll go ahead and close this off from here as agreed.  If you need a hand or have a question about your BT services in future feel free to post back as there is always someone around 😁

All the best,

Robbie

[pippincp]

@RobbieMacSo what was causing it then?

[RobbieMac]

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@pippincp wrote:

@RobbieMacSo what was causing it then?

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@pippincp It was an issue with DLM that was causing the constant retrains.

Cheers,

Robbie