Disconnects every night. Frustrating.

[garymuk]

I've been getting the same nightly reset anywhere between 1am and 3am.  It is incredibly frustrating because that's our prime time window for watching TV.  I am absolutely livid, every time it happens, and it's been happening for YEARS.

I've viewed the Basic Status page on the BT router many many times after an interruption, and consistently the system uptime does NOT reset, its the network uptime that resets. Meaning, it's not a power outage with the router.

What's even more frustrating, is that my Sky Q boxes do not recover from this network outage for several minutes.  Even though I actively prompt the Q box to attempt to reconnect, again and again. I have to wait for some arbitrary timeout before the router lets the Sky Q boxes back on the wifi network, restart the streaming app on the Q box, and relocate the video we were watching.

My wife vents her frustration out on me, and I keep having to make pathetic excuses on behalf of this substandard broadband service.  I'm just glad I'm not the only one having these problems.

[grahamm1]

I've had this problem twice over the years - in two different premises. In both cases the fault turned out to be a bad connection on Openreach's side.

In my most recent instance the disconnections usually happened around midnight to 1AM. Silent line test was quiet. An Openreach engineer came and changed the master socket as he said they had a reputation for poor connection at the faceplate. No change.

As the disconnections occurred at roughly the same time, I looked for something switching on/off around that time. I couldn't find anything, so powered my hub from a DC power supply and the problems continued (so it wasn't the mains causing the issue). Next, I turned off my central heating, fridge and freezer for a few hours as these had been suggested as possible causes. No change.

A second Openreach engineer came and found the problem within minutes. The incoming copper cable was laid along some roof tiles and the insulation had worn away, exposing the copper. He snipped the offending piece out and gave it to me to show just how it had worn. We assume that the drop in temperature and increased wind and moisture late at night caused the issue to be more prevalent at that time of day. No idea why silent line test didn't pick this up.

He replaced the copper cable and the problem (mostly) went away. I still got very occasional disconnects but these were rare.

INCIDENTALLY: Six months after this I switched to Full Fibre. I STILL get occasional disconnects (a few seconds every 10 days or so). BT Customer services tell me that that is to be expected.

[DavidM]

Hi @garymuk and welcome to our community.

I'm sorry you're seeing drops around the same time every night. I'm sure this is really frustrating for you. @grahamm1 has posted some good advice but there could be a number of reasons for the drops. Take a look at ::. Kitz - REIN, SHINE & RFI .:: for some help and advice on this. It doesn't necessarily have to be within your property so it's worth checking if anything local like street lights etc switch on at that time. Let me know how you get on.

Cheers

David

[garymuk]

I captured the Technical Log under normal circumstances, and then during a period of low quality:

Normal values:

Data rate: 9.49 Mbps / 49.23 Mbps

Maximum data rate: 9491 / 49553

Noise margin: 6.2 dB / 5 dB

Line attenuation: 57.4 dB

Signal attenuation: 41.9 dB / 57.6 dB

Values during disruption (not severe enough to disconnect this time):

Data rate: 9.49 Mbps / 49.23 Mbps

Maximum data rate: 9491 / 46171

Noise margin: 6.2 dB / 3.6 dB

Line attenuation: 57.4 dB

Signal attenuation: 41.8 dB / 56.4 dB

According to https://help.keenetic.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015810899-VDSL-line-parameters 

Noise Margin: failures may occur all the way up to 10dB, with synchronisation problems below 6dB.  As you can see, during the outage the US value dropped well below 6dB.

Signal attenuation: failures may occur above 40dB, with synchronisation drops above 50dB.  My values report above 40dB even during reliable periods.

What's worrying me is that these values are borderline even during regular usage.

I'm going to buy an AM/MW radio and tune it to 612KHz to detect possible REIN interference