So many faults!?

[#1]

Started getting faults on our connection a few weeks ago and raised a call which led to an openreach engineer being called out

First engineer visit said they’d found a cable issue in the street and a follow up job was raised to fix that. Next engineering came to that follow up job only to say that was wrong and it was a fix at the box just outside the house. So that was done.

Connection issues are now even worse with it dropping out and only getting much slower speeds. Contacted plusnet again to be told there was some unexplained openreach planned outages on the network so could be that so best to wait until that was due to complete. Did that, issues still continuing and now worse than before the first engineer was called out. This is now several weeks later.

Engineer called out again to say speed is fine to the house but drops off considerably as it comes in and not need to take a day off work for another visit to have probably new cables drilled through walls and run around skirting boards etc.

It seems really difficult to understand that all of a sudden we’ve gone from acceptable service to three faults being on the cable in the street, the connection outside the house and now an internal issue that is so bad the speed is unusable, any ideas what is going on here?

[#2]

@grae Did any of the engineers who came actually suggest it could just be a fault with your master socket - did they suggest just checking that?

New cabling &c seems rather drastic to me.

Which modem/router do you have?

[#3]

So just had the follow up test done and speed is showing 20 right up to the router, so seems like that has been causing the issues more recently since the external faults were fixed.

It’s a BT Smarthub which I had kept since we moved to Plusnet a good few years ago as I was led to believe this would be better than the Plusnet ones. If I need to replace it now what do you think the best option would be? Are the latest Plusnet ones just as good now?

[#4]

@grae The  current PN Hubs are merely rebadged/slightly modified BT kit, so will be as good, or potentially better than your old (how old?) model.

To be honest, the 'information' you have previously been given is, to put it politely, a load of rubbish - I cannot believe Openreach engineers/PN advisors are so badly trained.

If you can, try plugging your router direct into the test socket on your master socket - via a filter, and see if that gives an improvement.

[#5]

@grae    "Engineer called out again to say speed is fine to the house but drops off considerably as it comes in "

@jab1 :  "New cabling &c seems rather drastic to me."

Not unknown though - as I know from personal experience:

When the houses in my area were first built, both the telephone and BT Cable TV cables looped between each house in underground tubes, appearing behind a panel in the front wall of each house - ie in the wall cavity. The TV co-ax then went off to the lounge and the telephone cable to the hall, both in tubes built in to the structure of the house. All very neat and hidden away.

About 9 years ago we decided to have our master socket moved from the hall in to the lounge, and Openreach did this. From the joint in the front wall cavity, they drilled through the inner wall in to the lounge, and fitted approx only 1.5 metres of internal cable to the new master socket.

Ever since we moved to this house 12 years ago, we had been having very regular line faults, (until we were moved to a different cab 4 years ago), and Openreach were monthly visitors to test and fix.

What was found on one occasion after the cab move, was that the regular disturbing of the cables in our front wall joint had caused the internal cable to rub against the wall and expose the conductors.

Replacing that short length of cable on that occasion resolved the issue, (not the bigger problem of the joint up the road though!).

[#6]

@Mr_Paul Fair enough - but my reading of the initial post makes me a tad suspicious of certain peoples capabilities.

We shall see if the OP comes back with more information.

[#7]

The main cable comes in under the floor to a master socket which is in a cupboard under the stairs but has no power and isn’t easily accessible at all, so an extension cable runs from here to the next room where the router is. This is all running in the crawl space under floor which on clay soil and is very, very damp.

So I was sort of ok with the idea of just putting a new cable straight through the lounge wall from outside as this would take all of this out of the equation, but would be a bit messy as needs to run around door frames etc. but I was surprised when the test was done that we are getting such a fast speed right up to the router, but the speed the other side is only half of this at best and upload is less than 1!

Current router is an original BT smart hub I think.

Thanks for the replies.

[#8]

Is yours an underground or overhead feed? Whichever, where it currently enters your premises will dictate where the master socket will be positioned. I didn't realise, or you didn't say previously, that it was such a weird routing within the house.

[#9]

@grae , what speed should you be getting? You mention it is now 20Mbps down and <1Mbps up - that would be expected for a (relatively good) ADSL line. FTTC could be expected to get more (dependent on distance to the cabinet).

Is the speed you mention the router's sync speed or a speed test result?

[#10]

@corringham You have just pointed out my big error - I should have asked the OP which service they were on - until we know that, we are just speculating.

[#11]

Of course, there is a difference between faults causing drops and speed. It seems that the faults may have been fixed by the engineer - what we don't know yet is whether there is a problem with the speed.

[#12]

It’s an underground feed, not sure why it was put in under the stairs originally as serves no useful purpose there but possibly where the original phone socket was in the hallway

[#13]

So it feeds into your house underground - that I understand, but I highly doubt BT/Openreach did the internal wiring, which makes me wonder who did.