Connection dropped and now speed is so slow

[#1]

Have been on a stable connection of 1.3MB/s for ages, then tonight the connection just drops and now the speed is half of that, 0.6MB/s.   

It would be nice to switch to fibre, but despite living in the middle of a large city and most of the surrounding streets having access to fibre, Openreach haven't upgraded our cabinet and say they have no intention of doing so.  I think they made a mistake and skipped it accidently when they upgraded the others around here.  So here I am in the second decade of the 21st century and I'm stuck on this crappy ADSL2+ that is like something from the dark ages.  

[#2]

Hey @Azagoth,

I'm really sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused you. I'm testing the line this evening and whilst I can definitely see that there's an issue, it's unclear what's caused the problem. I can see that the drops started occurring a couple of days ago - can you think of any changes that might have been made in the property at the time which coincide with this?

[#3]

No changes have happened at all.  One moment the line was stable at 1.2-1.3MB/s, then it dropped and the speed halved.

[#4]

Thanks for confirming that. Do you have a landline phone setup? If so, have you noticed any issues with the service on that front, such as the line being crackly or no dial tone being present?

[#5]

The phone line is fine. No noise on it at all and the dial tone is always present.

[#6]

Thanks for confirming that, that's some good news and it helps us to narrow down potential causes. Is the router currently setup in the Master Phone Socket at the property or is it in an Extension Phone Socket?

[#7]

It's in the master socket, the one where the BT line enters the house.

[#8]

Hi there!

I'm really sorry that your speed's very slow. I've done what's known as an SNR reset to try to improve your speed. If you're still having issues after 24 hours then we should arrange an Openreach engineer visit to take a closer look.

As for fibre, I can see Openreach are starting to built full fibre infrastructure in your area so hopefully this comes soon. If you type your address into the fibre checker here https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband#fibrechecker you'll be able to keep an eye out for updates. 

[#9]

Whatever you did seems to have increased my speed, it's now back to a decent enough speed.

[#10]

That is fantastic news Please get back to us if you need any more help. 

[#11]

@Gandalf @SammyM The speed has dropped again.  It's been perfectly stable at 1.5-1.6MB for a month, but I got back from work today and it's dropped to this.  

Nothing in the house or on the PC/router has been changed and the phoneline is quiet.  Can you give it another kick up the 'arris (SNR reset) like you did previously please?

[#12]

@Azagoth Looking at those figures, you are connected at 3.59Mb/s, not far off the max. Are you still on an ADSL connection?

Why do you see this as a 'drop'?

BTW, Gandalf is no longer on the Social Media team.

[#13]

Hi @Azagoth, our logs are showing that the connection is dropping out every few minutes so we'll need to get to the bottom of that issue for you, an SNR reset at this stage would only make that worse and in turn lower speeds as DLM takes effect. 

Can you try following the checks here as your next step please?

https://www.plus.net/help/broadband/connection-troubleshooting/

[#14]

Looking at the difference in the stats between posts #9 and #11 would lead me to suspect that there is REIN present in the locality.  Remember that the SNRM is a MARGIN metric, not an absolute measure.  It is the level of the usable signal ABOVE the background noise.  The fact that both sets of figures report a 6dB margin with markedly different speeds imply that the background noise was different at the times the stats were captured.

This scenario needs dynamic monitoring of the line stats.  Which router are you using?  Router Stats is a handing free program (see the link below) which works well with many routers, but not all routers.  There is a special version for the BTHH5a which works well with the Plusnet Hub One.  I recommend a sample interval of 10 seconds.  You only need to worry about the SNRM plot.  I expect that it will be a tad crazy like the example below...

That shows a line suffering from a great deal of REIN giving rise to repeated disconnections.

Following the stats in post #11 you should expect to see that the connection remains stable, but slow, with the SNRM being significantly elevated if the intermittent (electrical) noise has abated.

Check the phone line for noise regularly - bad joints giving rise to intermittent noise will give rise to the exact issues you appear to be having.  Note that the act of testing a line, or just using it can "fix" the issue for a short period of time.