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Message 1 of 2

BT Hub keeps rebooting and speed loss

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Morning everyone,

I have a problem with my BT hub which began after we switched from ordinary BT fibre (FTTC) to a Gfast contract at the start of December.

The problem is the hub keeps rebooting. By that I mean the internet fails (on all devices whether wired in or WiFi) and the hub goes through its light cycle of green, flashing orange, orange, blue. The modem always sets up automatically after the drop and it always takes only a few minutes to come back on line. Sadly, this is enough to disrupt work calls and gaming.

The event log records something like this: DSL link down, duration was XXXXX seconds. Most of the time this happens overnight, but with the first hub (we have just had it replaced) the drops got progressively more frequent and, according to BT, peaked at 19 in one day. At the same time we have had speed issues - first dropping to around 60mb/s, which is roughly what we used to get on the old FTTC contract, and then down to 30mb/s. At one point the whole thing went down - phone and internet, with purple lights on the modem - and this was traced to wiring entering the house which was fixed.

But to try to solve the modem rebooting, BT have tried changing the Gfast booster, they have checked the line, they have sent a new rooter. I have tried a quiet line test and I have tried unplugging virtually everything and plugging the modem into the test socket (we have an OpenReach Master 5c with no extensions). I have disconnected all the powerline adaptors and the sky boxes. I have disconnected the phone. We had 48 hours last week with no reboots but I can’t trace this to any action I have taken or that BT took. The reboots began again, in fact over the last weekend we had multiple drops during the day and very slow speeds, despite having removed most of our stuff from the network.

On Monday I plugged the phone and the sky Q box plugged back in (although not the Sky mini). This week the speeds are back up to 100mb/s and the drops seem to be more regular at around 3am, which is obviously the best time for this to happen, if it has to.

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might be causing this and what else we could try to stop the reboots. My concern is if the speeds drop again and the frequency of rebooting picks up, esp during the day, as happened with the previous modem and over the weekend.

One OpenReach engineer has written on the case notes that my line is not suitable for Gfast so the next step really is to try removing Gfast and reverting to ordinary FTTC. But I like the Gfast speeds and don’t know for sure if even that would fix the drops.

Does anyone here have any other thoughts on what I or BT could try to solve this issue? I have no complaints about the BT helpline but they seem out of ideas. An engineer is booked for Friday but whether they have anything new to offer I don’t really know (which is not a complaint - I am just no longer sure what can be done). I did notice that a local BT IP address seemed to be trying to connect to our modem last night around 11pm (DoS message on the event log). Not sure what that means, if anything.

Sorry for the long post and thank you in advance for any help or advice!

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Message 2 of 2

Re: BT Hub keeps rebooting and speed loss

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I had an OR engineer visit this morning and offer his explanation in case anyone else experiences the same problem.

He was very clear that we are too far from the cabinet for Gfast to work. (I think around 350m). This has never been mentioned to me before as an issue, certainly not by BT, although a previous OR engineer also told me the line was not suitable for Gfast without saying why.

He said our connection is very unstable. He had a measure of stability on his phone that showed a lot of red (bad, apparently) against our broadband connection. He scrolled back to mid Feb (his system would not go further back) and found only two days since then when he can see our connection could be described as "stable". 

His view is that the night time drops occur because every night there is a DSLAM test that will check for errors and stability. The reboots are attempts to solve my underlying stability problem. So actually there is no "solution" to the reboots - they are in fact attempts to solve a different stability problem.

To me, who is not an engineer, this account makes sense because often the connection is good but often it is not. So there is clearly variability.

His suggestion is that we revert back to standard FTTC broadband. I have a BT call scheduled for Monday so will start that ball rolling then. Shame.

 

 

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