Billion UK Forum

Sorry this is long. I have struggled for a month with my internet. Let me begin by saying I am not very technical. We live quite rurally, not far from the exchange as the crow flies, but quite a ways by road.

Early January, BT replaced a pole near us. We lost the internet. They fixed it, saying the workers had not reconnected the line. Internet came back but where I had been seeing 4.6-4.9mb down, I was now getting 2.1 and even down to .8, with the SNR creeping up daily.
1st engineer - brilliant. Spent 5 hours here. tested the line, no errors, called my ISP (Spitfire) to no an SNR reset and once he convinced them he wasn't trying to mimic an improvement by just resetting the SNR and claiming it had fixed the slow speed, he retested. 203 errors in 217 seconds. Spent the next 3 ours driving to and fro and testing to try to isolate the problem. Submitted the job to have a length of cable replaced.

ISP called BT who claimed they had replaced the cable. The time they gave was the time the engineer was standing outside my window, directly in from of the security camera, holding up the yellow ticket in on hand and a hammer to nail it to the pole in the other. Oops.

2nd Engineer - nice but useless. Appointment time between 8 and 1. Arrived at abut 12:50 to tell me that no, the cable had not been replaced sorry. But the job had been resubmitted.

3rd engineer - pointless. ISP said they had to book another engineer to "move the job along" and I should call them when he arrived. 8-1 appt, arrived 12:20. I called ISP and they basically told him there was nothing for him to do, just not close the job.

BT said they had to get permission from the council to dig.

Finally they assigned a day. claimed the cable had been replaced, but my speed was still in the 2 range and and there is absolutely no evidence of any digging (at least not along the road between here and the pole the engineer defined as the problem area, and not in the field between us and the road. I know that is not concrete evidence but still...)

Bought the Billion 7800DXL because of the SNR tweaks. The engineer said the line should get, by his testing, 5mb. At the pole it tested 8mb but that is a pipe dream

Installed. SNR showed at 16.5
Did the tweak 4093 to lower it 9 dB

Here is where it gets weird.
My Billion shows SNR of 4.9
Rate (Kbps) 6016 down 704 up

the online speedtest (Ookla) shows 28ms ping 3.32 down .58 up
the online non-flash SpeedofMe test shows 27ms ping 3.66 down 700 up

It seems sluggish. not anything like 6mb

Will asking my ISP to reset the SNR and then setting it to the standard -1 help? Which speedtest do I believe? Why would my router lie to me?

Previously I had a Draytek 2800VG. That also showed a difference between the online speedtest and the router speeds but it was usually less than .5 mb, never as much as 2!

Thanks for any info or guidance.

Any helpful info?

Cheers

Mary Anne

You might want to ask you ISP to reset the line profile first,

If you still have issues it might be a '"misaligned virtual path profile".

I found a thread that seems similar to your issues, posted by Edinburgh2 from the Kitz forum.

Here is his post that might help (props to the Kitz forum and Edinburgh2)

I am pleased to report that BT has now solved the problem for me. It required an e-mail to the CEO but then, within 48 hours, I received extremely attentive and helpful attention and the problem was resolved. I was told that mine was an unusual (but not unique) problem.

The downstream output power (7.5dBm) was a red herring. That is unchanged, but the broadband speed and BT Vision VOD are now fine. It is possible the power is still not right, but it was not the root cause of my problem.

I had a "misaligned virtual path profile". This virtual path profile is not visible to the first line support people so they would never have been able to diagnose this. Apparently the 'virtual path profile' should be set automatically by software to match my IP profile but that had not happened on my line.

BT's 'executive complaints team' has been excellent and I am very impressed with their manner, technical competence and personal attention. But I have told them it is a great pity that the first line service does not have a process that escalates long-term problems to this team itself, without requiring the customer to contact the Chief Executive.

I hope my experiences here may help some others who have similar symptoms.

Direct link http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=2737.0

Thanks for that. I'll have a look at the forum link and zee if I can make sense of it.

Mary Anne

My ISP won't reset the SNR (i that what you mean by line profile?) because they say it is within the 10 days they require for an SNR reset stabalization.

Most of the discussion in that forum post went right over my head (remember, not technical, me) but I did key in on the fact that the output was deemed low, and the guy who answered said it should be in the "high 19 range" - mine is 19.9 so not sure if the rmisaligned virtual path profile is the answer.

I have an engineer booked and will bring it up to him. Hoping I get one like the first one (a real gem) and not like the last one (a bumbler right from the start)

ukmaryanne wrote:My ISP won't reset the SNR (i that what you mean by line profile?) because they say it is within the 10 days they require for an SNR reset stabalization.

Most of the discussion in that forum post went right over my head (remember, not technical, me) but I did key in on the fact that the output was deemed low, and the guy who answered said it should be in the "high 19 range" - mine is 19.9 so not sure if the rmisaligned virtual path profile is the answer.

I have an engineer booked and will bring it up to him. Hoping I get one like the first one (a real gem) and not like the last one (a bumbler right from the start)

That's fine, when the engineers arrives ask him to check to see if you have "misaligned virtual path profile"