I’ve had a problem with my BT Fibre 1 service which has required several months and 8 engineer visits and it’s still not quite right. I’m losing the will to live with phoning the BT fault reporting service so I’m hoping someone here can help me out.
The brief history is that in mid-April my hub started disconnecting a few times per day. BT checked the wiring in the house and pronounced that it was fine, which was as expected - there’s only about 3m of internal wiring to the master socket 5c and no extensions.
An Openreach engineer visited a few days later and said that my fibre port at the DSLAM was broken but, as there were no spare ports, I couldn’t be swapped onto a working port. He arranged for a DSLAM engineer to correct the problem. At this point, the hub was reporting downstream sync speeds of between 12 and 16Mbps and upstream always at 0.8Mbps.
About 1 month after the initial fault report and two weeks after the Openreach visit, nothing had improved so I called BT again. This time, Openreach found a fault in the cable that feeds the telegraph pole opposite my house. The cable fault was fixed in mid-May and the hub reported sync speeds of 34.999Mbps downstream and 0.8Mbps upstream.
I did some reading about how BT’s broadband works and decided that DLM or something similar was probably limited my speeds because of errors due to the faulty cable. I phoned the fault reporting number again to complain that my speeds weren’t back to normal and, after quite a bit of debate, another Openreach engineer was dispatched. He also said there was a fault in the DSLAM and that he’d have to book a specialist DSLAM engineer.
The following morning, 5 June, my hub’s light was purple and there was indeed an engineer working at the DLSAM. After a couple of hours, the hub light went blue again and I was very happy to see that the line had synchronised at 44.1Mbps downstream and 8Mbps upstream. This was the kind of speed I’d been used to before the problem started in April. It stayed like this for the rest of the day with no disconnections.
My joy was short-lived though. The next morning, 6 June, the line was back to 34.999Mbps downstream and 0.8Mbps upstream. I spoke to the person in BT who was handling my case and he spoke to his manager. They agreed it was probably DLM and, because the manager had access to the appropriate systems through a previous role, he initiated some kind of reset.
Over the next few weeks, my speeds increased gradually when DLM, or whatever, did its work overnight. By 30 June, I was at 39.998Mbps downstream and 5.998Mbps upstream. Since then, there’s been no improvement. There was a power-cut on 30 June which may not have helped the apparent error counts on my line but I was hoping the speeds might have continued there upward trajectory by now.
When the hub first connected at a normal speed on 5 June, following the DSLAM work, the hub reported:
Data rate:
8.002 Mbps / 44.108 Mbps
Maximum data rate:
8.264 Mbps / 45.042 Mbps
Noise margin:
6.2 / 6.3
Line attenuation:
11.6 / 20.5
Signal attenuation:
11.4 / 19.5
Yesterday, 24 July, it was reporting:
DSL uptime:
24 days,05 Hours37 Mins19 Secs
Data rate:
5.998 Mbps / 39.998 Mbps
Maximum data rate:
8.846 Mbps / 49.999 Mbps
Noise margin:
7.6 / 6.0
Line attenuation:
11.5 / 20.6
Signal attenuation:
11.4 / 19.5
It seems to me that the line is capable of running faster than the 6/40 down/up that I’m getting now, especially as it used to do so before this fault. It feels like something in the BT system is deliberately limiting my speed but doing so unnecessarily.
Is anyone able to suggest what I should do to get the speeds to increase back to their old normal?
I’ve got lots more data, including the hub logs going back to 30 April if it helps.
