It has been a couple of months since I started this thread. I didn't return to it because despite what the Openreach engineer told me at the end of August, the DLM never got my sync speed back above 74Mbps - even though the hub resynced itself many times.
I reported it again yesterday, and today Openreach came out again. Line tested OK from the joint inside the front wall of my house, (as per the previous engineer, who didn't come inside the house), but at the socket, (1 metre of cable inside the house from the joint), he was measuring errors. After changing the master socket faceplate the hub resynced at 80Mbps - hooray!, first time in 2 months!! But he still wasn't happy - his tester was still showing errors.
Next he replaced the master socket backplate. Hub syncs at 80 again but he still isn't happy with the errors. Suspicion now falls upon the short bit of cable from the joint in the wall to the socket. He says that it is not one piece of cable, but seems to have another joint in it. I had a look and found that it was actually one piece, but was jammed in the brickwork and the white outer sheathing was badly torn exposing the individual wires inside. He proposed drilling a new hole to run a cable through and putting a new socket in a location that was not good for us. Luckily, he was happy for me show him how to strip back the insulation on each conductor of the old and replacement cables and twist them together, to use the old to draw the new one through. Working between us, we managed to carefully pull in the new cable through the original hole.
Great fun - took me back to my days as a BT apprentice exactly 40 years ago 😀
But still he wasn't happy. Although my hub syncs at 80, shows a Maximum Data Rate of 87 and a download noise margin of 7.2dB, his tester is still showing errors!
So now he has changed both parts of the master socket and replaced the internal wiring. The only thing left is the 50 metre underground cable from the joint in my house to the cabinet, (a 10 pair cable with just me and a near neighbour on). Although he could find nothing wrong with our existing pair, he changed it anyway.
Once again the hub resynced at 80, but the Maximum Data Rate shot up from 87 to 100.5Mbps, and the noise margin from 9.3 to 10.7dB. These are similar figures to those measured when I was moved to the nearer cabinet in March 2020, and before our neighbour was transferred as well. (I suspect that our proximity to the cabinet was masking a number of issues?).
Finally, his tester stopped erroring!!!!
So my broadband circuit is now like Trigger's Broom - for those that understand the reference 😀
Hopefully, it will stay like this - but I would like the Openreach engineer who came today to be recognised for his persistence in getting to the bottom of these problems. I believe that there is a procedure for doing this - can someone advise please? I have a VOL fault reference if that helps.
