Interesting example of how big companies work today.
A customer in darkest rural Cumbria phoned complaining of slow broadband. Its always been slow, around 2mb, but had dropped even more. BT weren't interested
Anyway, I turned up, found the router (a Belkin) synching on download at 450kb/sec. I ran repeated checks with the Thinkbroadband tool and got consistent 130kb/sec.
Checked the internal wiring, found that a Sky TV engineer had paid a visit to install a Sky box - and in the process had removed my ADSL filter and replaced it with a 2 into 1 phone socket doubler. I also found the router had had its ADSL cable replaced with one from a fax machine, and was plugged directly into another phone socket, not a filter.
I resolved all this and the synch speed went up to 2120kb/s. However the speed check stayed at 130kb/s. The router reported noise margin at ~12db, but line attenuation at 51db. Used a 20m extension cable plugged into the test socket to eliminate the internal extensions - no change, so the problem was external
Spoke to customer, who revealed the Sky engineer had tried to get them to switch to Sky broadband and had almost certainly rewired things when they refused (a common thread around here)
Spoke to BT support, who identified that while the line was indeed synching at around 2mb/s, it had been profiled to run at 130kb/s. I'm sure this was because the miswiring had caused errors on the line, so BT reduced the speed to an unacceptable level to avoid the errors! The BT tech reprofiled the line to 1700kb/s and said it would need up to 24 hours to change
Not good, but at least its close to the synch speed.
BUT ........ BT clearly had identified a problem with the line, so why didn't they do something about it rather than reduce the service speed to an unacceptable level?
As as for Sky......removing the ADSL filters, or installing the Skybox cable on the upstream side of the filter is standard practice for their engineers around here
Next to convince BT to do something about the attenuation, though I have little hope
Last edited by Milo Minderbinder; 23rd June 2012 at 20:30.