In the first part of Come REIN or SHINE I went over the history of the issues I’m having with my Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC or VDSL) broadband and in this article I’m going to talk about all the things we’ve tried to do over the years to fix my broadband, and the elephant in the room that no-one wants to address (well, until about 5 minutes before I started writing this series). In the next article I’ll talk about how I’m going about monitoring the outages and the stuff I’ve set up to do that.
There’s a caveat here that all of this is from memory, I haven’t documented it as I’ve gone along and while I’ve used email conversations to try and remember bits, most of the conversations with tech support have been on their internal systems so I have no record of them. SamKnows used to have a page that showed when the various flavours of went live for a particular exchange, but that seems to have gone now that they have been bought by Cisco. I’m going to estimate that we got FTTC/VDSL in maybe 2014 or 2015, nearly 10 years ago.
REIN and SHINE
I can’t tell you how many BT visits I’ve had, every single one of them has made a real effort to try and find the cause of the problem, but in all those visits they have replaced the cable from the street to my master socket, at least twice. They replace the master socket itself seemingly every other visit.
The engineers have variously run tests on the copper remotely, running resistance tests to try and spot any problems with the copper, they’ve run tests with various devices and even told me that the test equipment in the exchange was faulty, but I’m sure that’s fine! They have gone down the street and at every point where there are connections exposed they’ve checked and remade them many many times.
I’ve not mentioned yet that the copper (actually, it’s probably aluminium) in our street is direct in ground, that means it’s buried in the ground and can’t easily be replaced without digging the street up. It’s also the reason we don’t have full fibre yet, no-one wants to dig the street up (but as I write this series Virgin Media ARE digging the street up to put fibre in, though there is no go live date yet).
To be fair to the engineers, the things they’ve tried are sensible things to do, the first time they came out we didn’t have a master socket! The previous residents had removed it, twisted some cable onto the ends and run it to another place in the house. That cable was bell cable … for doorbells.
Next one of the engineers showed me his test equipment and it was showing hundreds of thousands of FEC errors, we traced that to one of my powerline adapters, sending the network to my office at the other side of the house. I replaced it but it had no effect on the dropouts I was having. Several months later it failed again so I replaced the powerline adapters with a run of external ethernet round the outside of the house and upgraded it to gigabit speed instead of whatever the powerline was giving me.
Several engineers have commented that my setup is “too complicated” and it’s probably that that causing the issue, I was fairly confident it wasn’t as I’d had the issues before I added more capable hardware. To finally, once and for all rule out that being the problem however I had a 2nd line installed1, secretly hoping it’d end up on a different bit of the local infrastructure and I’d be able to point to it and say “Look! This is fine now, it’s the copper!” alas that didn’t happen and I ended up on the same cable, just a different pair of wires. Probably one I’d been on before. I 100% ruled out my network setup as the culprit though by attaching an ISP provided router to the original line with no other equipment attached or on it’s wifi and it too dropped out at random.
but at this point I think that it’s external to my house, and external to the BT network too!
1) The 2nd line was provided by IDNet, who have a monthly no contract broadband option available.
In part 3 I’ll describe how I attempt to monitor all this with Grafana and Home Assistant and look for patterns in the dropouts.