ADSL Line help

[LomWoss]

I'm hoping that someone can help me here with this.

I have a connection (2 Meg) but it is not very stable at all and Telkom have no idea what is going on other than to tell me that I am too far away from the exchange, and that obviously my house is slowing moving further from the exchange.

On a good day my ADSL status looks like this :
ADSL
Type Interleave Path
Status SHOWTIME
Downstream Upstream
Data rate(Kbps) 2041Kb 507Kb
Noise Margin 14 12
Output power(dBm) 0 146
Attenuation(dB) 49 26

On a bad day the Noise Margin can range from anywhere from 10-14, yes it moves about as it sees fit. I have listened to the line and can hear no noise, I have unplugged everything but the router and still no joy. About 2 years ago I could get 3.5 Meg on the line but that has gone the way of the dodo. I chalk that up to more people getting lines in our neck of the woods.

Now here is my confusion, telkom say that there is nothing wrong with the line but on tuesday afternoon and night and all day wednesday the line was rocking. During that time the Noise margin jumped up to 21 and the line was oh so sweet. The missus was a happy bunny as she had no lag during her D3 sessions.

Does any one here know of someone at telkom I can talk to about this, as I am pretty sure by now that there is obviously a physical issue somewhere on my link but telkom don't seem to care, everytime I talk to them all they do is drop my line speed and send me on my way. I would really love to have a higher speed but at this moment I would settle for a slower speed but more stability. I really can't deal with all the dropped packets.

 

[Tim the Techxpert]

Hi There,
It does look a difficult problem to isolate. Your line stats are not in a bad range but this site indicates that the line performance is bad. You should be getting at least 3000+.
Have you made sure that your router is not the problem? If you can borrow a router from a friend and they take yours try swapping them and see if your performance improves and theirs goes worse.
It may be a congested exchange especially after the upgrades of last year.
I don't have a silver bullet contact at Telkom that can assist you but I would suggest that you keep reporting the fault.
Have you also talked to your neighbours to see what their line performance is like?

Regards

Tim

 

[LomWoss]

Hi Tim

Thanks for the reply. I should have mentioned that I have tried 3 different routers, with no change. I haven't spoken to the neighbours to find out if they have any issues, and I guess I will have to go say hello. I'm a little retesant to log a fault with telkom as when I do they just drop my line speed, and at the rate that they do it, I may as well break out the old US robotic 56K modem I still have in the cupboard as it will give me a better speeds

If anyone else is in the Discovery area and have a rocking line or a crap line please let me know, so that I can tell if I need to slit my wrists or feel that I am not the only one with this issue in the area.

 

[FSJ]

I have the exact same problem. I used to be on 4 mb/s consistently, but it started hovering around 3.5 mb/s at a stage, with constant drops. Now I'm on 2 mb/s and have 5 daily disconnects. Everything was fine at 4 mb/s for more that a year - now the modem just stands still at random times (also tried several) and I have to restart it. No idea what it is. Current modem doesn't give me any line stats unfortunately.