Oh dear, what have OR done

[#1]

I've had steady high 60s for a while now, but Openreach have been in the area installing fibre infrastructure and on Friday they put an overhead fibre feed to our pole (which I'm very excited about :D) - however since 10am Friday my FTTC connection has been all over the place! Lots of disconnections, noise margin swinging from 0.5 to 6.5dB, currently at 54Mbps. I'm hoping they come back tomorrow and sort out whatever they touched on Friday!

[#2]

Have you done a phone Quiet Line Test?

[#3]

no, I suspect it will be very scratchy though Haven't had a landline phone plugged in for ages, might have a root around to see if I can find it

[#4]

That would be a great idea, as I suspect they have disturbed your copper line, which would be the quickest way to report a fault.

[#5]

You could also do a line test using - Plusnet - troubleshoot by text

[#6]

@Anonymous Good point - although they are not 100% reliable.

[#7]

But at least it's automated, costs the price of a text, gives a quick result, and if it does find a problem will book an engineer visit

[#8]

Fair enough.

[#9]

In another year or two, doing a "quiet line test" will be a thing of the past when analogue phones are phased out.

Then what will we do ?

😧

[#10]

AIUI, when almost everyone is on FTTP, the OR system/network monitoring will pick faults up automatically - well, that's the theory as I've read it, anyway.

[#11]

For me that will be a long wait.

I'm planning on upgrading from  FTTC+landline  to  SOGEA+VoIP  in the next six weeks

but Openreach plans to install FTTP in my area are sometime after 2028 and possibly as late as 2030

[#12]

Interesting. My ISP is being proactive and doing that for all their customers anyway. My FTTP availability is supposed to be by mid next year - OR are currently installing the kit on some of our poles at the moment, but in a very haphazard manner. They are certainly working on it, but seem to have 'gone for a lie-down' this past few weeks.

[#13]

Dropped again during the night to less than 20Meg, but the test is unable to find any performance problem

Just spoken to the OR engineers fitting the fibre infra and they reckon an underground cable has gone down, but it was definitely, certainly, absolutely nothing to do with them. 

[#14]

@daveaspy If you are on Fibre Extra - as your original post clearly indicates - then that BT test above is a total load of rubbish.

Report a fault, and insist it is looked into properly.

[#15]

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@jab1 wrote:

AIUI, when almost everyone is on FTTP, the OR system/network monitoring will pick faults up automatically - well, that's the theory as I've read it, anyway.

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Thre's going to be a long time - possibly a decade - after PSTN is switched off before every connection is FTTP. There needs to be a way to check a line which isn't the quiet line test.