BT TV Bringing Broadband Down

[oldhasbeen]

We've had BT broadband for years, it's worked very well.

Since we've added BT TV we've had no end of problems, with the TV and Broadband going down every other day. Sometimes it can't be brought up again, no matter how many times I reboot the router/modem. We've had a BT engineer round but 3 days after he "fixed" the problem we were back to square one.

Last night when the broadband was down, the diagnostic tools gave me these diagnostic messages:

"Your DNS Server might be unavailable"

"Your Broadband modem is experiencing connectivity issues"

The broadband was back up this morning (I haven't turned the TV on yet).  I spoke to BT technical support, who tried their best but  I am not confident that they have an answer - the TV support is outsourced and completely independent of the broadband support, so no-one can look at the whole problem.  Without a proper diagnosis, all solutions are guesswork.

Has anyone had similar issues? Any suggestions, other than "get a different broadband /tv supplier"?

All help gratefully received!

[David_H]

Hi @oldhasbeen thanks for posting.

The errors you mentioned suggest there's a broadband issue on the line that's being made worse by the increased traffic that the TV service generates - that could be due to a line impairment or some connectivity issue. 

If you can send me your TV box serial number on a private message, I'll take a look and advise on what steps might be needed. You can send me a PM by clicking on my  name then "View Profile" and clicking on "Message"

regards

David

[oldhasbeen]

David
Are you a BT employee? I've already got a BT bod looking at this issue, he thinks it might be due to my modem/router being upstairs (with my PC) and my BT BT box downstairs. He is sending me some adaptor leads to fit upstairs / downstairs to address the problem but I am sceptical: when we tried something similar years ago when we had the modem/router downstairs, it created more problems than it solved. That's why we got a local ex-BT local guy in to move our internet access point, router & modem upstairs.

Before I got the BT box, we were using apps like iPlayer, Amazon Prime and ITVX downstairs without any discernible impact on the broadband upstairs.

OHB

[David_H]

Hi @oldhasbeen  I work in the BT TV Technical Investigations team - we provide 3rd line support to TMC and our colleagues on the front line as well as the broadband side of the business. 

Ref the "adaptor leads to fit upstairs / downstairs" those sound like Power Line Adapters or Extenders that route the broadband signal over the home mains - they are a means to an end, but can also be prone to interference from switched power supplies and "noisy" mains so are not a complete solution, but get the job done if direct wiring or Wi-Fi connections are impractical due to distance or dampening due to internal walls / insulation etc. 

Streaming services like iPlayer, Amazon Prime and ITVX generally use what's called "adaptive" or "DASH" bit rates to vary the bandwidth used to protect stability and connectivity on constrained lines, while multicast streams such as TNT Sports or the Extra TV Channels in the EPG (above ch 300) demand a minimum bit rate that doesn't vary - its around 3.5Mb/s for an SD channel, but 10Mb/s for HD and around 30Mb/s for full UHD.

I suspect it's the latter that may cause your problems if you have recently taken on those services. If you are happy for me to take a look and co-op with the TMC team, I'll be happy to do so - ping me a PM if you would like, and if you could include any fault reference number you have from the other report, I'll be able to reach out internally to the right people.

Thanks, 

David

[oldhasbeen]

Hi David

a "Powerline Adaptor Pair" are in the post to me.

My issue reference number is VOL013-***********. 

Thanks!

[rbz5416]

It's possible that whatever devices you were using to stream previously were connected to 2.4GHz. This is slower than 5GHz but has greater range. The BT Pro Box is for some odd reason restricted to 5GHz, so distance could indeed be an issue with streaming. But it would seem odd that it affects the external connection.