Intermittent Drops in BT Fibre Broadband Connection

[October]

I am still experiencing drops in performance intermittently. 

The wifi part of the system,since buying my own equipment has been great.

But im paying out a lot of money for a package that can't deliver due to the poor 4g signal. So their equipment is just cluttering up my spare room

So I'll just have to bide my time then I can sack BT permanently.  Pathetic service overall.

[Gadgetboarder]

Hi All,

I have been having similar  problems. 
I hope this solution helps:

I was using BT fibre 900 with a super hub for awhile and then started seeing some connection issues after talking to BT and having some engineers visit it was suggested that I go to a super hub pro. This is what I did and it was stable for three months or so and in the past 3 to 4 weeks it has been dropping out regularly to the point where it would drop every minute or two for anything between five seconds to 2 minutes.

Long story short I had four internal engineer visits and two external engineer visits. I’ve spoken to numerous EE guides on the subject and to be fair to everyone they have tried their absolute best to solve the issue. When the engineers come for the internal inspection everything looks fine. There is an out bit of Wi-Fi congestion which shouldn’t happen as I only have 12 devices on the one gigabyte connection. The root of light is rock solid blue with no loss of signal the ONT has all three green lights on. The PON light is always on and I never have the LOS loss of signal light on Red at all but both Wi-Fi and wired connections dropout all the time .

The penultimate open reach engineer change the ONT for another one I believe it was a Nokia ONT. After having this programmed it, it was still dropping out he’s lying. Test was perfect for two green lights and the speed coming in or the signal test they do was at 15, which is perfect. The hub always showed Wan gigabit connection WAN coming in.

The guides were at a loss of what to do next and I was certain, as an electrical/electronic engineer of 34 years, that it was some sort of software issue.

The final open reach engineer came out and I explained to him what had happened and what equipment we’ve been through. It had had a new ONT and three different hubs nothing solve the issue. He spoke to one of his friends who was a fibre man for nine years and he suggested going into a nokia 2 ONT.

he did this after much conversation with the first line technical support for Openreach who are based in India and run through the standard script about changing the ONT resetting the router checking all the signals are coming in okay with the greenlight test and the speed coming in. He finally got through to the second line Support and while he was talking to them I noticed that the WAN speed Into the router was showing 2.44 Gb/ second.

We discussed that with the Support engineer and she wasn’t sure what was going on.

we discussed that with the Support engineer and she wasn’t sure what was going on.

After five hoursOf chopping and changing equipment and being on hold with the various technical support levels he tried to run his test on the network but it kept flagging upThat my router had negotiated a low speed than the ONT expected and wouldn’t let him close the job.

that my router had negotiated a low speed than the ONT expected and wouldn’t let him close the job.

I did ask if this was something to do With the speed coming into the hub not matching the service it should be one gig per second And not 2.44.

At this point the Internet both wired and wireless was stable, thinking our solve the problem, He put the original ONT back and the hub Showed one gig WAN Again.

again.

Then the Internet dropped out immediately and was back to the old situation I’ve intermittent drops every minute or two. What we had to do then was run the test he needed to run with the original ONT in place To complete his test to allow him to close the job  then the lady on the second line Support reprogrammed the Nokia 2 ONT. 

This is how the system was left with the Nokia 2 ONT Installed to the hub and it has been solid connection for two days now. I was getting 20 to 30 dropouts every hour previously.

installed to the hub and it has been solid connection for two days now. I was getting 20 to 30 dropouts every hour previously.

If ever an engineer comes to test the line again, it will throw a communication saying there’s a discrepancy between ONT and speeds but ultimately this solve the problem.

Personally I think the ONT was the fault even though all lights were green hub was fine. It seemed like it couldn’t handle the speed at the super pro was pulling and kept dropping the connection momentarily for it to come back seconds or minutes later.

personally, I think the ONT was the fault even though all lights were green hub was fine. It seemed like it couldn’t handle the speed at the super pro was pulling and kept dropping the connection momentarily for it to come back seconds or minutes later.

The ONT2 is a faster unit that doesn’t seem to suffer the same issue and he was able to report this back to his second line team and also other fibre engineers in his area because none of them have seen this before so hopefully that learning get shared as well.

.

I have a follow-up call tomorrow with the EE guide so I will inform him of what has happened in the hope that he learn from this and actually do some investigation as to what’s going on between the interfaces of the ONT and the hub that seem to mis-handshake the connection.

hopefully this has solved my issue and maybe have used to anyone reading this and if anyone from EE or BT can read this and feed it back into the company in some form of knowledge base so that we don’t all have the frustrations of having engineer after engineer come out to work on their demarcated part of the system  where an overall picture is required. There’s obviously a speed issue between devices that is more common than his thought but none of the tests show any faults anywhere anywhere in the system be that exchange fibre line ONT or hub there needs to be entering accountability at some point.

.

Fingers crossed this helps

[iniltous]

I suspect some measurements are getting mis interpreted here ….a GPON system is 2.4Gb download and 1.2Gb upload , that’s the aggregate bandwidth, the way a PON works is all ‘data’ is download data is broadcast to all users simultaneously , so if your neighbours are watching Netflix, and you are watching Amazon Prime , your data arrives at next doors ONT as well as your OBT and their data arrives at your ONT as well as their ONT (times that by upto 30 users download  data  ) , effectively your ONT only responds to the data addressed to you and ignores everyone else’s data  , the same for next doors, their ONT is only interested in their data ,not yours or anyone else’s on the PON .. that’s how Ethernet works ….if you buy a 1Gb profile the ONT limits the rate you receive to that , if next door are on 150Mb their ONT limits their port speed to the appropriate rate but the headend pushes the data out at 2.4Gb max and you see that rate before the ONT  , that’s why your 1Gb service has a guaranteed speed much lower than 1Gb  , if there were 30 customers all intensively downloading and all on 1Gb services , 2400Mb /30 =80 Mb , but statistically that not going to happen plus apart from speed tests download data isn’t consumed in a consistent manner, that how  30 customer on a PON can get the speeds they pay for .

I suspect the 2.4Gb you saw was the aggregate download GPON speed before the port speed limit was applied to your individual service by the headend telling your ONT , you are a  1Gb customer , seeing 2.4Gb is too coincidental not to be the total headend download speed , not your individual port speed set by your ONT 

[Gadgetboarder]

Hi , nit sure if this was a reply  to me as i didn't understand the content as there were acronyms s i don’t understand, but i have some screen shots of the hub before and after ONT’s if that helps as were were changing them  and also the test result cro. The open reach engineers test thats shows the speed mismatch. I cant post that as a phot as it won’t let me drop the size anymore and its too big as a phot so here the text.

it was failing i mediately not after the 5 - 10 minute usul test he told me:

Here are the results of your FTTP test request for OGEA80547872

usingFastTest+.

The outcome was Customers router has negotiated with the

ONT at a lower speed than product. This is either a issue with the router or cable. Please reset the router and retest if the problem is not resolved then replace the Ethernet cable. Please check the connection quality between ONT and Router.

The date and time we processed

thats all i got from photographing his phone, but you get the gist.

[iniltous]

Presumably you have an EE router as the user interface doesn’t look like the BT one .

OR usual OBT are rated at 1Gb , some new speed profiles on offer from EE (BT don’t offer it ) are 1.6Gb , and they require an ONT swap from 1Gb to a 2.5Gb rated ONT as the 1Gb one isn’t compatible with the increased speed ….once a 2.5Gb ONT is fitted , it’s backwards compatible if the customer downgraded to speeds of 1Gb or less , 

The router shows a  2.5Gb WAN link initially, presumably your ONT is the latest 2.5Gb version ( check what version of ONT is fitted   ) why the link speed then reduces to 1Gb may be a problem with the negotiation between headend and ONT , or it could be because you are only on a 1Gb service , having said that , someone on 500Mb the link speed shows 1Gb on 1Gb ONT’s .

Not all Ethernet cables are the same standard , if the ONT were connected to the router with  an vet old Ethernet cable , it may only capable of 100Mb , or if a faulty cable is used then the link may not work at the design speed but a lower speed , hence the comment

ONT at a lower speed than product. This is either a issue with the router or cable. Please reset the router and retest if the problem is not resolved then replace the Ethernet cable. Please check the connection quality between ONT and Router.

If you are not on the 1.6Gb profile but have a 2.5Gb ONT , that should be OK but I’d ask to be put on a 1Gb ONT so there is no compatibility issues between the ONT and headend .

[Gadgetboarder]

Thank you for all that info but most of it is over my head. I just know that my internet is now working when it was dropping 20-30 times an hour. So i’m not changing anything now.  We have changed hubs, ONT’s, cables etc. and this is what we found to work.

The 1gb ONT just didn’t work as we did an ABA back to back test.

i was only offering all this info incase anyone else is stuck as it may give options because the issue took weeks to resolve. 

thank you for your input. The issue with BT/EE (to me they are the same just rebranded) is that no-one has that complete end to end responsibility and it is the interfaces between responsibilities where I believe the problem lies. 

[Quesada]

I have been having the same issue for almost 2 years now, but will soon be able to leave without penalty.

[Quesada]

Hi

This is spooky because I have been having intermittent drops in connection for almost 2 years now. Back in November 2023, the fault actually occurred during an Openreach engineers visit and whilst I was on my mobile, talking to a remote BT technician. Although the technician advised the engineer to upgrade the ONT, it transpired that after almost 2 hours, he could not obtain authority from his superiors at Openreach. Apparently it boiled down to who would forfeit the costs. The Hub was exchanged during the next engineers visit, (there have been 13 so far), but with a like for like model. You couldn't make it up.