Yes the connection speed is terrible, although I could live with that.
It's the constant dropouts that are becoming a massive pain. We often lose broadband completely for half of the day (every day). The connection dropout you observed in the stats was an automatic dropout not a manual reset.
This was a BT install, and I have never made any modifications. Its never really been satisfactory and multiple engineers have genuinely tried their best to fix it. This is the first time I have tried to diagnose the problem myself.
I should give you a bit of background about the house: It is a fairly large Victorian semidetached. The internal phone extension wiring is an absolute mess. There is also evidence that there was two separate BT lines coming into the house at one stage. I initially assumed that this legacy wiring was the root of the problem. i.e. that it was that this was acting as one big RF antenna and picking up noise from everywhere. I am all to familiar with RF noise in my job.
I have tested the various phone extensions and they do appear to go dead when the faceplate of the master socket is removed.
I had assumed that using the test socket would remove the internal wiring from the equation and give me a clean quiet signal. I'm afraid I don't have a corded handset to test properly for hiss/buzz on the phone line. I had to use a Panasonic cordless phone which I know is less than ideal. However, I can't hear anything obviously wrong on any extension line, or through the test socket.
I did NOT however use a new ADSL filter - I used a spare that I had hanging around. I would make sense to rule this out so I will try and find a new filter today. The cable connecting from the ADSL filter to the HH5 is one of the standard flat rj11 types about 1m long. I could also see if I can find a proper CAT5 rj11 to replace this?
