Fibre Broadband Issues - wierd speedtest problems...

Mizuno Man

Hi all,

I will not claim to be clever or knowledgeable with these things, so I really am just looking to see if anyone has heard of this before....

I have had VF Fibre for almost a year now - up until recently I have had 35-40 Mb wifi speeds and around 55-60 wired via a powerline adaptor to my PC.

Lately the speeds have been consistently poor on both wifi and wired and the connection has been intermittently dropping completely for short periods. I am talking to VF about it and they are simply saying my line (from the cabinet) can not take the speed they are sending me, so they are insisting on reducing it. They feel this will stop the drop offs.

I can't figure out what changed after 7 months of perfect service. But in any case, I have bridged the Vodafone hg658c modem router and added my old TP Link Archer router instead, just to see what would happen. This has given me better wifi speeds than ever before - generally 35-40 but sometimes up to 55 mb. The wired connection isn't great though - but it is via powerline so i wouldn't be too shocked at that fact.

The weird bit is that if I run a speedtest on my PC - I get about 2/3 of the way through the download test and the connection will fail - every time. Wifi internet connection drops at the same time, so the bridged Vodafone modem is throwing a panic for some reason.

If I run a speedtest over wifi, there is never an issue.

Does anyone have any idea whether any of the above indicates where my problems may lie?

For what it's worth, I have a lot of wifi devices in the house between smoke alarms, heating system, light bulbs and so on - maybe up to 21 devices at various times.

Thanks for any hints or tips!! As always, VF Customer Support are very slow to respond and rarely answer the full list of questions you pose...

MM

ED E

Sounds like an unstable link. In some cases a heavy traffic will cause a spike in errors enough that the DSLAM kicks you off and starts again (causing a brief disconnect).


You need to get the VDSL line stats from the Huawei and post them here for anyone to really comment but most likely this is something you'll have to push with Vodafone (so they send OpenEir). We can try and arm you to do so though.

Login to their modem and find the diagnostics page, it will have info like signal to noise ratio and attenuation. Post that info here.

Mizuno Man

ED E,

Many thanks for your reply and I very much appreciate the idea that you may be able to 'arm' me in advance of pushing further with VF.

I am having difficulty logging back into the VF modem, even wired directly to it, now that it is bridged. I may need to go nuclear and factory reset it and try again. I'll keep at it in the meantime and I'll post whatever diagnostics I can find once I'm in...

MM

ED E

It'll be using an alternative local address as its not part of your lan, often 192.168.100.1 but not always.

Mizuno Man

ED E,

I must apologise - between the mayhem of life I totally forgot to get to you on my troubles....

After bridging the VF modem router I mentioned to Vodafone that I was now getting wifi speeds far in excess of that which I could manage with their own router. That was enough to prompt them into sending me a new modem router - the HG659 to replace the HG658c they gave me originally. Happily, the HG659 had dual band wifi and I am now getting 65 Mb download speeds over the 5GHz wifi on a line that has a max of 70. Hooray!

When it comes to the drop offs, while I was waiting for the new router to arrive, I noticed by accident that turning off the powerline ethernet adaptor to my PC would stop the drop offs completely. Enabling it again and running a speedtest would cause the modem to disconnect it's VDSL connection every single time. The new HG659 is behaving exactly the same way. Looking through the diagnostics on the HG659 shows no sign of any errors or discarded packets via Ethernet.

So I am not sure why it is happening but it certainly seems my powerline adaptor is the culprit for the disconnects. When I first bought it it was great for months on end - giving me 45-50Mb downloads via the mains. Maybe it's just tired??

ED E

Mizuno Man wrote: »

the HG659 to replace the HG658c they gave me originally.

VF should never have shipped the 658c to VDSL customers. It was pure stinge. Totally not up to the job. Even Eirs F1000(Zyxel) was better (they now use the 59b too).

Mizuno Man wrote: »

So I am not sure why it is happening but it certainly seems my powerline adaptor is the culprit for the disconnects. When I first bought it it was great for months on end - giving me 45-50Mb downloads via the mains. Maybe it's just tired??

You're not the first to report such issues.

Either the PH line is parallel to the mains at some point and some noise in inducing across or its coming back through the PSU. You could try putting a surge protector on the PSU for the 659 but I cant promise that it will have any impact whatsoever.