Billion UK Forum

h2005uk wrote: ↑Sun Jan 19, 2025 11:00 pm Hi

My BT FTTC broadband connection usually remains synced for weeks at a time, but recently it's not managed more than a week or so. On one occasion I was using it when it happened and checked the SNR margin - it'd dropped to 0db when it's usually at 5.5-6dB.

There was no noise on the phone at the time, which makes me think it's not noise on the line, but possibly electrical noise picked up by internal wiring from devices in the house.

A while ago I noticed the admin/config page started to take 15-20 seconds to load. It wasn't all the time but now and then. I recently set my Raspberry Pi to monitor the SNR and I noticed today that the router config page was slow to load again.

Out of interest I checked the SNR monitoring and it dropped to about 4dB (from 5.5-6) when the router was slowly loading the config page, then it increased back to 5.5-6 when it finished loading. I wondered if it was something to do with the router's load, so I tried downloading a large file on my laptop and again the SNR dropped, raising again when I stopped the download.

Is it possible the router's developed some sort of fault that's affecting either how it reports the SNR, or how it deals with the DSL signal? I wondered if this was also the cause of the slight increase in frequency of broadband dropouts. The router's 4.5 years old now but I recently did a factory reset and reloaded my config settings.

Just for info, my parents have the same router so I set up SNR monitoring on their one as well, and the SNR on their one doesn't drop when the config page is loaded (and it loads quicker too) or when a large file is downloading.

Thanks.

h2005uk wrote: ↑Mon Jan 20, 2025 2:57 pm I don't live that near them so I'm not sure yet when I'll be able to do that (or even if, as I suspect they'll be wary of me doing it in fear it may break something ).

However, I've tried disconnecting my router from the phone line and the config pages were still very slow to load, suggesting there's definitely something up with the router.

If it was something to do with the line though, surely the SNR reading wouldn't be affected by accessing the router's config page or downloading large files? I googled this issue and have found nothing suggesting this can happen on this make (or other makes) of router.

h2005uk wrote: ↑Tue Jan 21, 2025 7:23 pm I'll see if I can get a spare router to try this.

The fact that the Billion's config page still takes ages to load even when disconnected from the phone line suggests it's an issue with the router though.

It's 4.5 years old - is that old for a router?