Significant speed drop with Voyager ADSL connection

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#2262365 22-Jun-2019 11:09

traderstu:

Thanks again @BarTender and @hio77. So, from your comments above, am I correct in concluding that my speed may never improve with Voyager? If I switch back to Spark I would expect similar speeds to what I had before? Please understand that I am not being pedantic here. A 40% reduction is significant and we now experience quite a lot of buffering and jittery playback when streaming video.

I noticed this morning that the Chorus broadband checker says that we "might" be able to get VDSL here. I am aware that we are right on the edge of VDSL coverage, but I am guessing that you would say "don't go there" considering the errors that I am getting?

I wouldn't recommend going to VDSL if you have a marginal connection as the pain won't be worth it.

When I moved house the new place was exchange connected and we were well within the VDSL range but had poor copper bundle back to the exchange. I never got over 14mbit down and 500kbit up on VDSL. The wiring in my house was clean where I had moved the VDSL router in the roof to the ETP and had Chorus come out a few times to attempt to resolve it including them doing a copper pair swap.

I still had the best sync rate of everyone else in the street by at least 4Mbit.

The main factor with poor DSL is poor internal wiring plus certain routers perform worse than others in connect rate and stability. Ironically enough the Huawei HG659B (not any of the other Huawei's) and the Draytek routers perform the most reliably with the Nokia/ALu 7302 DSLAM ADSL and VDSL cards. So if you had one of them it might be worth swapping out to see if that makes any difference.

hio77

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#2262366 22-Jun-2019 11:11

@bartender to be fair to chorus, pretty sure they personally selected you the worst pairs in the street.....

#include <std_disclaimer>

Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

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#2262413 22-Jun-2019 11:35

hio77: @bartender to be fair to chorus, pretty sure they personally selected you the worst pairs in the street.....

Unkind, but not unjust.

traderstu

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#2263571 24-Jun-2019 18:44

Great news, Voyager support have been in touch. They say:

voyager:

We have looked into this but the DD DLM only works for VDSL and not applicable on an ADSL connection.
The speeds showing on your Modem stats coincides with the line tests we get from Chorus.
Unfortunately, we cannot turn off interleaving as this is not an option available with us. To make sure we can deliver the service as reliable as possible, we leave interleaving on for maximum stability.
If you can tell us what speeds you were getting from when you were still with your previous provider, and if there is a significant difference, then maybe we can get Chorus to investigate.

So I have resent my screengrabs and also a screengrab from the chorus bb checker saying that I should expect speeds of about 13Mb/s. I have asked them to get in touch with Chorus. I am left wondering how my SNR on upload jumped up from 12.4 to 6.4 if dd DLM doesn't work on ADSL. Was there some sort of manual intervention?

@BarTender I took heed of your comment about the Draytek router. When we shifted in, I originally had a Draytek router. This has since died and been replaced with the TP-Link router. Is it possible that the Draytek router established the 6dB SNR, and in the absence of a port reset, this was maintained when I switched to the TP-Link router? I have a Draytek on the way, so I will let you know if there is any improvement when I swap it out.

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#2263601 24-Jun-2019 19:41

traderstu:

Great news, Voyager support have been in touch. They say:

voyager:

We have looked into this but the DD DLM only works for VDSL and not applicable on an ADSL connection.
The speeds showing on your Modem stats coincides with the line tests we get from Chorus.
Unfortunately, we cannot turn off interleaving as this is not an option available with us. To make sure we can deliver the service as reliable as possible, we leave interleaving on for maximum stability.
If you can tell us what speeds you were getting from when you were still with your previous provider, and if there is a significant difference, then maybe we can get Chorus to investigate.

So I have resent my screengrabs and also a screengrab from the chorus bb checker saying that I should expect speeds of about 13Mb/s. I have asked them to get in touch with Chorus. I am left wondering how my SNR on upload jumped up from 12.4 to 6.4 if dd DLM doesn't work on ADSL. Was there some sort of manual intervention?

@BarTender I took heed of your comment about the Draytek router. When we shifted in, I originally had a Draytek router. This has since died and been replaced with the TP-Link router. Is it possible that the Draytek router established the 6dB SNR, and in the absence of a port reset, this was maintained when I switched to the TP-Link router? I have a Draytek on the way, so I will let you know if there is any improvement when I swap it out.

If you can track down a Huawei HG659b (the Spark version) then give that a crack too. I found them excellent apart from the issue with the 32 device limit.

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#2263618 24-Jun-2019 20:11

Hey,

We do have ddDLM on ADSL2.

Please PM me your address and I’ll take a look into this.

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traderstu

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#2263629 24-Jun-2019 20:25

Thanks @BMarquis , pm sent.

@BarTender I'll get a Hauwei on the way as well

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#2264085 25-Jun-2019 14:30

I've emailed @traderstu some information.

At a high level...

I would expect that, eventually, ddDLM would likely move back to a lower target noise margin. It hasn’t yet, which may mean that the resync(s) around the time and the modem swaps, may have DLM thinking the line is unstable. Or soemthing else, coincidental has occurred.
I’ve forced DLM’s hand… I’ve also started some detailed analysis of the line to get a better idea of what is going on. Particularly if DLM decides it knows better than I do :)
Sync rate back up to slightly under 13mbps.

traderstu

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#2264088 25-Jun-2019 14:34

Thanks @BMarquis much appreciated. I'll give it a week or so to settle right down and post some final stats.

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#2271076 6-Jul-2019 14:47

Bad news - my download has dropped back to 12 SNR and 9302 kbps. Does anybody know whether Voyager can turn on interleaving? I know that Voyager support says that it is on but I wonder how reliable this is given that they don't know that dd DLM works on ADSL. For me the clue is that my ping has dropped from 19 to 9ms. Is this not a fairly good indication that interleaving is less with Voyager than it was with Spark - and explains my drop in d/l speed?

BMarquis

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#2271118 6-Jul-2019 18:19

traderstu:
Bad news - my download has dropped back to 12 SNR and 9302 kbps. Does anybody know whether Voyager can turn on interleaving? I know that Voyager support says that it is on but I wonder how reliable this is given that they don't know that dd DLM works on ADSL. For me the clue is that my ping has dropped from 19 to 9ms. Is this not a fairly good indication that interleaving is less with Voyager than it was with Spark - and explains my drop in d/l speed?

Hey Stuart,

I’ll take a look on Monday and email you.
Unfortunately DSL is a fickle beast - and there are lots of valid reasons for your speed drop.

Dell

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traderstu

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#2271239 7-Jul-2019 07:57

Thanks Brent, that would be appreciated. Sorry I have to trouble you again.

As an aside, I found a good FAQ from Chorus that dispels a lot of the myths surrounding port resets, power cuts etc. It can be downloaded here

The bits of interest are as follows:

Chorus:

Q. For VDSL, doing a port refresh will restart the DLM process again. Is the
same true for ADSL?
A. A port refresh on ADSL or VDSL will not affect diagnosis driven DLM.

Q. If it happens automatically, would a modem restart or reset trigger
diagnosis driven DLM to restart?
A. Diagnosis driven DLM will know if a modem loses power, but it will not trigger a
restart of diagnosis driven DLM.

Q. If there is a wide area outage, would that trigger DLMs for all the
customers on the same DSLAM/street?

A. If an outage occurs like a power outage, diagnosis driven DLM will know and not try
to troubleshoot.

Brent, it seems to me that Voyager do something differently to Spark with their provisioning settings. Is it possible for you to check this at your end? If this is the case, and Voyager are unable/unwilling to put it right, I will eat humble pie and go back to Spark. For me a 20% reduction in price is not worth a 40% reduction in download speed.

RunningMan

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#2271242 7-Jul-2019 08:30

I mentioned it already here, but it seems to me you are chasing a mythical speed from the Spark connection. The screen shot you show of your previous connection speed shows a downstream noise margin of 1.4 dB. This is far lower than the best profile you would get of 6 dB, and means the modem has synced during a short time of very low background noise (the noise has since returned) at a higher rate than the line could normally allow.

This isn't Voyager providing a different service, it's just a fluke that you managed to have it so high at the time the connection was with Spark.

traderstu

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#2271248 7-Jul-2019 08:52

Sorry, I should have corrected this when you originally posted. I now realize ( I didn't know so much about these things, then) that this was an anomaly of some sort. That screenshot was taken on 2/5, about a month before I swapped. Below is a screenshot from the day before I swapped. The SNR is 6.3 and the d/l is 13 Mb/s

traderstu

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#2271250 7-Jul-2019 09:04

And @RunningMan

please let me assure you that the Spark speed was not "mythical". Below is a speedtest before I swapped:

and this is the speedtest after:

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