intermittently noisy phone and slow/dropped broadband for last 7 months

[Timmoss]

I hope I'm not repeating an old thread.
I'm hoping someone can give me some pointers or tell me how to kick BT'S support team into action.
I have BT infinity 1 and landline phone and have suffered intermittent failures with both since last June, as follows:

June, reported failed phone and broadband failure and noise, engineer visited and advised replacement master socket and internal wiring which I refused as he couldn't give me s price. Besides speeds had been fine at 51mb/s up until the fault. He replaced external connections from down wire to incoming cable with gel filled idc connectors.

Fault returned next day, was told 2 weeks for engineer visit so looked myself, idc crimps fell off in my hand! Repaired with soldered connection and waterproof cover ,service restored.

Two weeks later same fault and another engineer who never made it to the house, apparently found an external fault but didn't tell me. However fault disappeared but returned 4 weeks later

This carried on for another 6 fault retorts and three more engineer visits but with no resolution. Always a similar symptom, usually s noisy crackly phone line which may fall altogether plus slow and intermittent broadband.

I generally use a vigor 2860 router and for the last month have been monitoring it DSL stats and logs plus running a corn job to log speed Test results.
As expected, noisy phone corresponds to a worsening of the snr margin although not necessarily of speed. The first to go with regards to speed is uplink speed plus an associated loss of bit depth in the lower frequency tone band. Although no loss of speed there are frequent drips in streaming radio or video plus errors from the speedtest saying it can't contact server.
I'm now updated to infinity 2 and when working well I get 75 Mb/s down and 19 MB/s up attainable rates reported by both hh5 and vigor 2860 are 95 - 100 Mb/s down and 30 up. On a bad day it can often drop to 5mbps or lower
BT Openreach have replaced the overhead cable down into the house and I've replaced all internal cabling and installed avdsl faceplate hard wired to the router via cat 3 twisted pair cable, they don't work at the exchange and cabinet but still no resolution.
Today, regular drop outs on iplayer radio and a crackly line. Once of the galling things is on out of contract and paying a fortune for the service, I don't want to move until the fault is fixed however.

All ideas gratefully received
P.s. I have at last got a support supervisor to make the case, who although very helpful can't do much more than keep sending engineers out.

.

[imjolly]

so if you use the test socket and do quiet line test - dial 17070 option 2 - do you get crackle with a corded phone?

[Timmoss]

Thanks for your reply.
Yes, crackly and noisy virus test socket, also seem to get rf interference, radio etc.
I've been logging the results of quiet line test over the last week or two, both via standard and test socket, no difference between the two other than that noted.
Tested this morning and noticed iplayer radio dropped, checked on the router and sure enough it logged a line drop and resend whenever the phone is picked up.

[imjolly]

if drops when phone picked up the possibly a High Resistence fault and need engineer visit by phoning 151  until you can get rid of the line noise you are not going to make any progress with your broadband

[Timmoss]

Hi imjolly, understand and agree the need to get rid of the noise on phone linen in order to get broadband working reliably. I think my biggest issue is firstly getting through the help desk gatekeepers. As thedownload speed doesn't drop below the guaranteed limit, though upload drops very low with high packet loss I struggle getting any traction from them. I'm getting to the point where I feel I need to give their engineers the relevant information myself as it isn't going to get through from the help desk. Not a slur on the engineers, by and large they do a good job within the information they have to go on, the frustration is internal communication.

Does anyone know whether the DSLAM has been known to in, they'reject noise into the phone line? Virtually everything else had been changed

[pippincp]

Your problem appears tobe that you are reporting a broadband fault where you don't have one. You have a line fault and should report it as that on 151 with no mention of broadband.

Once the line fault is resolved your broadband will (sometimes slowly) recover.

[Timmoss]

Thanks Pippincp. You're absolutely right, my bad for not mentioning earlier that it's been reported as both line and broadband on separate occasions over the months. Lately I've been stressing that it is a line fault when calling 151. For the record I've had engineers from both disciplines visit and generally the broadband guys have treated and investigated the fault as a line fault with the benefit that sometimes they remove the throttling on the DSLAM at the end.
Thanks again for the reply.

[Timmoss]

Still no resolution to this fault. I've kept logs of the times the line is noisy along with regular router logs. I've had numerous engineer visits and spent hours on the phone to my case handler (now on the third one). Pho enow so noisy that calls are often impossible, router reports variable speeds but often atttainable rates lower than actual rates, over teh weekend speedtest results were 2mb/s down 1 up on a 76mb/s connection (supposedlly), ping response time varying between 12ms and 300ms.

I'm not sure where to take this now, Ofcom don't deal with individual complaints and as I'm out of contract I'm paying well over £300 per quarter for a service that has now been broken for 10 months. Anyone got any ideas? BT wont consider a refund until the fault is fixed {they've had ample time and I wouldn't be complainng unless there was a fault} or reduce the cost of service unless I sign up for a 12month contract, I wont sign in for 12 months to a broken service.

Anyone have any ideas how I can escalate this? The only thing ~I can think of is going through the small claims court for a refund on a very sub standard service.

[Timmoss]

PS. for the record: Teh DSLAM has been changed, cabling inside and outside the house to the telephone pole have been chaged. I'm seeing multiple CRCs and FECs plus LOS and LOF failureat both ends, speeds drop untill the connection fails completely and teh router modem resets, they then shoot back up to 70mb/s downsrteam smd the cycle continues.

The phone connection is horrinly noisy although not symetriically. i've been reporting this as a landline phone fault since the beginning of the yesr and have had a number of engineers out, but still no luck. Much of the problem is the massive layer of obfuscation between BT and Openreach, Openreach seem to treat this as a new fault every time and so have no idea of the history.

Any help on how to escalate this would be greatly appreciated

[imjolly]

see if forum mods can help you and maybe direct the openreach in the right direction taking into account all the previous engineer visits   mods will post help here