BiPac 7800N a poor performer at 512kb ADSL?

[Salty_Wagyu]

Yesterday I had a burst of line noise from an unknown source which made me lose 3.5mbit of my speed, all is fine now and it's syncing at its usual data rate, but obviously I need to wait 3-5 days for the local telephone exchange to update my IP Profile so I get the speeds pushed back up to normal.

For the moment it's chugging along at only 60KB/sec - equivalent to a 512kbit ADSL service, but I'm not able to load several websites at the same time, causing a server not found error in Firefox (also in Google Chrome) for any tabs in the background, the router seems to only be able to handle loading one (and sometimes two) sites at a time.

I am just curious if this is normal, as I did not experience anything like this from my 56k or 512kbit ADSL days last decade, it may have been slow but at least it was persistent in completing the loading of websites with the previous modems/routers I had instead of throwing up server not found errors.

Thanks.

edit: I also sometimes get websites half-loaded as well, and stops.

[devbod]

Sounds like your line noise is still there and causing significant packet loss. When I had a poor quality line I had similar symptoms. A visit to a VOIP test website (just google for one) will give you a measure of packet loss.

[Salty_Wagyu]

That was a partial capture of the line noise that was happening on 2nd April, which put me at 26 dB and 768kb sync, but after rebooting when it calmed down its been a straight line constantly at 6 dB (with the usual dip at night).

Just a few hours ago my IP profile caught up, so my speed is matching my sync now. It's too late to do any voip testing but I'm no longer getting any server timeouts when loading several websites with downloads running, which makes me think 512kb adsl put too much strain on the 7800N? Perhaps has something to do with a DNS timeout not being long enough?

Anywho, VOIP results: 0.0ms jitter, 0.2% packet loss, MOS score 4 on http://myspeed.visualware.com/indexvoip.php

[devbod]

Good the problem is gone but prevents diagnosing it further. Has me baffled though, hard to see the low volume of traffic of a DNS lookup having an issue but if the allocation of traffic priority was off then perhaps? I cannot come up with a better theory.

When I had a bad line I found that a lowish daytime SNR of 6dB worked well but became unstable at night. I use it mainly for daytime work so shouldnt have been an issue but the night time disconnects also hit my ip profile and I had to raise the SNR to avoid it. I raised it with BT and they moved my connection at the exchange which gave me a much more stable line. With attenuation of 60dB I'm guessing your exchange is much further away than mine which makes it very sensitive to noise.

Have you tried removing the ring wire at the master socket? At that range every little helps.

[Salty_Wagyu]

Indeed, it can be very sensitive, I have to try and sync under 4544 sometimes as it can't hold at the 0.5mbit profile above that (4544 - 5119 4.0 Mbps) by the time midnight approaches. I don't have a ring wire present at the socket either, think it was removed when a BT engineer came round to fix a damp socket many years ago.

Moving house in 3 weeks and its 1km closer to the exchange, will be happy to get away from here!

[roseway]

That Routerstats graph looks like a typical example of a temporary high resistance (HR) line fault. There's little you can do if it's now cleared itself, but if it recurs you should first check if there's any audible crackling or hissing on the phone, and if there is, then report it as a voice fault to your telephone provider.