Line Attenuation keeps increasing!

Matt Simis

When I first moved in 2 years ago the then newly upgraded exchange to my house was showing 38dB Downstream Attenutation at around 7.6Mb/s.

6mths later Eircom had to repair a line down the road as a tractor ran into it. dB increased to 42dB.

Now, another 9mths later Attenuation is at a colossal 47dB, which is squarely outside the extreme for 7Mb/s downstream. I might try an old modem and see if its different as the brand new modem they sent seems worse in everyway.


When I originally took out the contract Eircom kept telling me I only pass "3Mb/s" (though 7.6 worked fine for nearly the entire time), so I dont think they will be receptive. Is there anything that can be done about their ever diminishing line quality? :eek:

Xcellor

Not if the degradation is a result of stuff outside your house.

You can do the norma things. Reduce the length of phone cable from modem to main phone point, remove other phones, faxes, skyboxes etc...

Eircom have no obligation to provide proper broadband service.

Xzen

Xcellor wrote: »

Eircom have no obligation to provide proper broadband service.

Some might say: that's the case even when you're paying them for "service"

Zith

As Xcellor said, not much you can do if this is external to your house. Maybe if there is some crackling on the line for voice then they will have a look for wet junction boxes or poor connections.

Best you can do is ensure your end is as good as it can be. Check internal wiring and get a good modem. Some of the Netgears (DG384) are very good for pulling in a signal on a noisy line.

PogMoThoin

There are routers that slightly improve attenuation for those a long way from their exchange, I've seen them posted here before

Matt Simis

PogMoThoin wrote: »

There are routers that slightly improve attenuation for those a long way from their exchange, I've seen them posted here before

I tried to find such things before but couldnt come up with one!

BArra

the newer eircom zyxel gives me worse stats than the donkeys years old netopia 3347nwg

douglasman

BArra wrote: »

the newer eircom zyxel gives me worse stats than the donkeys years old netopia 3347nwg

Yes, this is normal. The Netopia is a better modem, gives higher sync rates, is more stable and that is reflected in the line stats it gives. The quality of your modem has a lot to do with what you can get out of your line.

Zith

My stats were 61.5 atten with 5.6 margin down and 31.5 with 18 margin up when using the Eircom supplied Zyxel. I got regular disconnects, by regular I mean at least once every two days and usually in the middle of a game of Bad Company 2. It then took about 1-2 minutes for the connection to come back.

I changed to a Netgear DG384 and put on the DGTeam firmware 1018 and I now have 59.0 atten with 6.5 margin down and 30.0 with 20 margin up. My uptime was 18 days until Eircom had an outage the other night.

No more random router resets.

Above is for a 3MB line. Connects at 3072 down and router says max attainable is 3740 or around that.