Line Attenuation of 69.5db

I stay in Hyde Park JHB. I have a uncapped 4mb line through mweb. According to Telkom the closest exchange is Rosebank about 7kms away. My line stats are:

Downstream
connection speed 2043kbps
line attenuation 69.5 db
Noise Margin 7 bd

Upstream
Connection speed 511kbps
line attenuation 40.0 db
Noise Margin 8.5 db

The line work fine most of the time and is stable at about 2mb, not great if you pay for a 4mb line, but I've made peace with it. The thing is at least once a month for 2-3 days the line goes totally dead. A senior technician at Telkom actually made a joke and said that it's a miracle the line work at all.

I read in another discussion forum that the max distance is not supposed to be more than 3.5km. Does anyone know if ADSL account holders have any options available to address this issue.

The closest Telkom Exchange might be 7km away, but you're most definitely not 7km away from the closest DSLAM, because then you won't even be able to get 384kbps with ADSL.

You're probably 5km away from the DSLAM, which is pretty much the limit of ADSL, and I really can't recommend anything above 512kbps for that kind of distance.
Usually with a line attenuation close to 70dB, you'll be unable to even sync reliably at 384kbps, so what the senior Telkom technician said wasn't a joke either.

Yes, anything beyond 3.5km (~50dB), you'll start to have issues with 4Mbps ADSL connections. The line attenuation increases about 14dB/km with ADSL.

You might want to find out if there aren't any DSLAM/UMC boxes closer to you, and if they have any plans of installing ones closer by.
I'm really not sure what you can do, and you're most definitely not the only one with this problem on the forum. You should've actually started this thread in the ADSL Discussions forum.

Pietersmi said:

I stay in Hyde Park JHB. I have a uncapped 4mb line through mweb. According to Telkom the closest exchange is Rosebank about 7kms away. My line stats are:

Downstream
connection speed 2043kbps
line attenuation 69.5 db
Noise Margin 7 bd

Upstream
Connection speed 511kbps
line attenuation 40.0 db
Noise Margin 8.5 db

The line work fine most of the time and is stable at about 2mb, not great if you pay for a 4mb line, but I've made peace with it. The thing is at least once a month for 2-3 days the line goes totally dead. A senior technician at Telkom actually made a joke and said that it's a miracle the line work at all.

I read in another discussion forum that the max distance is not supposed to be more than 3.5km. Does anyone know if ADSL account holders have any options available to address this issue.

Click to expand...

You should drop your line speed to 1 meg then it should be alright and you should also only pay for 1 meg instead of 4/10 megs line speed, you will save money.

What adsl router and ISP account you currently using?

At 69dB, you should stick to 384kbps if you want a stable connection.

Also, keep in mind, the hyde park exchange is over crowded. We are moving offices tomorrow, so that will free up 2 ports.

your best bet is to start making a ruckus with Telkom HQ. They have the budget to increase the number of DSLAMS in that exchange and if you keep complaining they do fix it. You will have to keep it up though. You will have to buy a 1gig data package to be able to get the error code to complain to the 0800375375 number. If you keep yelling they can actually pull a new line through and that should sort our your problem. You can get stable up to 6meg with line attenuation of 45 and noise margin of about 5db any lower and it will die.