Disconnections on Smart

SimonMaher

Hello all,

Quick question here. Ive been struggling with my Smart broadband connection for quite a while now. Im on the 4mb package and did the whole thing with swapping telephone numbers and the like. Worked perfectly for a while (rocksteady speeds day and night) but then I began to suffer disconnections every few minutes.

Checked all my leads (typing this now from a laptop connected by a 2ft cable to the modem with a 1 ft cable to the main socket on the wall with nothing else connected in the house. All were fine.

Smarts support in fairness have been very helpful and swapped out the modem and tried to talk me through various steps with checking cables, plugging into different sockets, changing filters etc. Eventually decided I needed an engineer callout but for some reason, the guy would only ring when he was in my estate. Oddly enough, I have to work in the daytime so a mad dash to Kiltipper wasnt always an option.

Havent managed to catch up with him yet.

Anyway, heres my line stats. I think I have a problem with my local line attenuation but there are better brains than me here who may be able to interpret the data and give me some help. All help appreciated.

Connected true
Operational Mode G.Dmt.BisPlus
State Showtime
Tx Bit Rate 320000
Rx Bit Rate 3552000
Local SNRMargin 11.5 dB
Local Line Attn 54.5 dB
Local Tx Power 11.7 dB
Remote Line Attn 30.0 dB
Remote SNRMargin 28.5 dB
Activate Line None Abort Start
Standard G.Dmt G.Dmt.Bis G.Dmt.BisPlusAuto G.Dmt.BisPlusOnly G.Span G.Span+ G.Span++ t1.413 g.lite Multimode ALCTL_14 ALCTL ADI
Code Type ADSL2 AnnexA

Simon

Dankoozy

its not connected at the full 4 mbits and your SNR isn't great either

http://www.sweetnam.eu/blog/index.php?/archives/59-Unblocked-Tubes.html

dub45

From your post it sounds as if at some stage your line deteriorated significantly.
If you post at http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums/index.php?
Make sure to put your phone number in your profile - the lads there will put you on the remedial profile which may help to steady the ship.

My own stats are very similar to yours - at the moment my line attenuation is 55 and the snr is 8. The latter rarely goes above 10 - in addition to the link that Dankoozy gave you these make interesting and maybe depressing reading too:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/linestats.htm

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/lowSNR.htm

Some people have found that a Netgear router/modem will handle an iffy line better than some other equipment - just a thought.

Actually I see now that you have already posted in the Smart forum and that you have been put on the remedial profile - there is not a lot more that people here can advise you really.

Sad Professor

I'm with Smart too and have similar line stats, although the connection is pretty solid. You might just have a bad line.

Try switching your operational mode to G.Dmt.Bis (instead of Plus). It may not help the stability problems but my line attenuation shows improvement on this setting. Worth a try if you haven't already.

digitaldr

Don't know if it's an urban legend or not but I heard somewhere that rain can affect copper lines. BTW what were your line stats like before your problems started??

Madong

digitaldr wrote:

Don't know if it's an urban legend or not but I heard somewhere that rain can affect copper lines. BTW what were your line stats like before your problems started??

its not an urban legend, some old manholes are not properly protected in Ireland and hence let in rain in heavy downpors! hence the water fills the manholes to a point and fecks with the cables.......

SimonMaher

Thanks for the suggestions all. I have everything connected now right beside the socket and have disconnected everything else including the (already filtered) alarm. Settings havent changed dramatically since before these problems. My attenuation was always quite high and the SNR margin was in or about 16-18.

Ive managed to get some improvement in the SNR margin (up to about 15) but the local line attenuation is still stuck at 54. Checked the box outside where the phone cables come in, and its fine too. All points to a problem with the line from estate junction box to the house. Not a good thing really!

Is it possible that there may be a dodgy connection at the exchange end and can Smart switch it to another one?

Simon

byte

I was having a lot of disconnects earlier in the year. The admin on the Smart forum put me on the remedial profile which helped, and I removed my new Netgear modem/router, as I found it useless with my poor quality line (I'm quite a distance from exchange).

I'm back to using the Aolynk modem supplied by Smart (bridged to a wireless router), and still on remedial 3Mbit connection, and haven't had a disconnect in quite a long while.

The guys on the Smart forum are very helpful, it's a pity many other ISP's don't offer the same.

Sad Professor

byte wrote:

The guys on the Smart forum are very helpful, it's a pity many other ISP's don't offer the same.

Agreed. Most ISPs won't even respond to emails.

lucernarian

Madong wrote:

its not an urban legend, some old manholes are not properly protected in Ireland and hence let in rain in heavy downpors! hence the water fills the manholes to a point and fecks with the cables.......

None of the manholes are waterproof. They are designed to handle some sort of water usually. It's the junction boxes themselves that are supposed to be waterproofed. And some lazy TE engineers in days gone never bothered to seal the junction boxes.

Still isn't as bad as the story of a water bottle being used in Australia for a junction box which then had to be re-cabled a few times. They eventually copped on to actually replacing the water bottle!