Spark Smart Modem 2 landline continuous intermittent fault

Forums › Spark New Zealand (including Skinny and BigPipe) › Spark Smart Modem 2 landline continuous intermittent fault

tm89

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#296024 15-May-2022 13:13

Around 10-12 months ago I switched over from copper broadband/landline to wireless broadband, spark supplied the Spark Smart Modem 2 for this service.

I live about 1.2km from the only cell tower in the area (shows full signal in the interface), my closest neighbours are 150m away. My experience with the internet connection side of it has been fast, stable and reliable, I haven't been able to fault that.

But ever since having the landline running over the wireless broadband its been problematic, sometimes calls will work, callers mention the call rang as normal on their end even though the phone won't ring on my end, other times the landline phone does ring and everything works until the call is answered and you cant hear the caller but they can hear you, sometimes its the other way around, other times you can get a few seconds of talking and then it goes dead, eventually after long enough the landline stops ringing to calls all together and that's it until you reboot the wireless modem. If theres any one of those issues happening then making calls doesn't work either.

If I restart the wireless modem, everything works alright for a few hours but guaranteed by the next morning its problematic again, requiring another restart.

Haven't been able to get this problem fixed via Spark on the times i've tried, various spark staff have blamed things from my neighbours microwave to the "interference" from others devices in my sparsely populated area, Spark has replaced the wireless modem & SIM card once, but the same problems exist on the replacement, i've replaced the landline phone but the same problem still exists.

I've got the feeling tier 1 support aren't going to be able to resolve this based on experiences to date.

Where to from here?

gzt

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#2914221 15-May-2022 13:31

Does the modem have a signal strength meter in the UI?

tm89

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#2914222 15-May-2022 13:33

Yeah it does, full signal, should have mentioned it in my initial post.

Bung

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#2914232 15-May-2022 14:28

What sort of phone are you using? Some ISPs encourage you to use a cordless phone i suspect because they don't rely on the modem for power. Modem phone ports can be quite limited compared to the connection to a conventional exchange.

tm89

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#2914235 15-May-2022 14:36

I have tried both, but it currently has a near new Uniden cordless phone connected, its only a few months old as it got replaced to rule out the previous phone.

The behaviour of the fault remained the same with both phones unfortunately.

technico

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#2915784 18-May-2022 20:44

Bung: What sort of phone are you using? Some ISPs encourage you to use a cordless phone i suspect because they don't rely on the modem for power. Modem phone ports can be quite limited compared to the connection to a conventional exchange.

Have a user who will be moving from office to work from home, using Wireless Broadband/'Landline' with a SmartModem 2 by the look of it.
He sits on a client contact management software package part of the day, and in the office uses an old external 14400 modem to dial contacts from the customer profile screen.
A boon to avoid dialling wrong numbers . .

Modem is USB (or maybe even serial) connx to PC and is externally powered from a plugpack - all it does is impose the dialling tones on the line when dial tone is detected.

Spark will provide 2 current cordless phones (probably Panasonic KX-TG682) but are very vague about what you can and can't hang on the modem phone line.
(Remember the Good Ole Days of Telepermitted devices?)

Anyone have experience with SmartModem 2 in this respect? Tech info seems very hard to come by for this modem. Apparently has Quectel innards, packaged by Arcadyan.

TIA

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#2915787 18-May-2022 21:05

tm89:

Yeah it does, full signal, should have mentioned it in my initial post.

Can you tell us the RSSI?

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tm89

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#2925444 11-Jun-2022 22:17

Signal RSRP -80.0 RSRQ -8.0 SINR 28.0

Another case for this fault began with spark a few days after posting here, its still on going, it goes through loops of escalation and repetitive "resetting & provisioning" which is going no where in the near 4 weeks its been.

Also during this time the modem now drops internet connection multiple times per day, sometimes its for a few minutes, some times for hours until manual intervention (remove & reinserting power) is required.

technico

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#2925818 12-Jun-2022 18:10

UPDATE BELOW

technico:

Have a user who will be moving from office to work from home, using Wireless Broadband/'Landline' with a SmartModem 2 by the look of it.
He sits on a client contact management software package part of the day, and in the office uses an old external 14400 modem to dial contacts from the customer profile screen.
A boon to avoid dialling wrong numbers . .

Modem is USB (or maybe even serial) connx to PC and is externally powered from a plugpack - all it does is impose the dialling tones on the line when dial tone is detected.

Spark will provide 2 current cordless phones (probably Panasonic KX-TG682) but are very vague about what you can and can't hang on the modem phone line.
(Remember the Good Ole Days of Telepermitted devices?)

Anyone have experience with SmartModem 2 in this respect? Tech info seems very hard to come by for this modem. Apparently has Quectel innards, packaged by Arcadyan.

TIA

Wireless Broadband initially installed and running within 30 minutes or so - phone and internet.
Very strong signal from cell tower; phone audio pretty scratchy - not a patch on old copper connection.

Since then the wireless broadband connection (phone) has been down twice, once for 5 days and once for 6 days.
Internet has been intermittent.
Helpdesk guys in the Phillipines seemed to get onto it OK, but it appeared local techs could not get a handle on it.
Modem replaced TWICE but in the end Our Man in Manila was able to tweak something and get it sorted within an hour . . .
Since then running for 5 days without event.

Fingers but not wires crossed. Still no intel on the SmartModem 2 - for instance why are there 2 external antenna connector?

tm89

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#2939883 8-Jul-2022 21:15

Spark was never able to resolve the fault.

Switched to Vodafone (for much less $$ also) and everything is working as expected.

Bung

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#2939957 9-Jul-2022 10:53

Is Vodafone also using a wireless broadband modem to provide the service?

tm89

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#2940047 9-Jul-2022 13:18

Yes, like for like service.

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BarTender

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#2940487 10-Jul-2022 18:58

This is a very interesting thread, as have a similar situation with my Mother In Law who I recently moved into a retirement village and since there was no intact ONT I moved her onto Wireless Broadband. She has had very unreliable phone where the phone would drop off the network, so when attempting to dial her I would go straight to voicemail. And when dialing out the phone would be dead with no dial tone but if I dialed my mobile it connected through.

What I have noticed is if the broadband connection idled for a period of time then the SIP session seemed to drop. And since my MIL has no other devices connected that could possibly generate traffic that happened a lot to start with. Then I installed a old router I installed OpenWRT on so I could come in remotely over a WireGuard VPN and login to the router client and inspect everything without needing to go to her house.

If I set the WireGuard idle timeout to 10 mins then I found the tunnel would drop after about 3 mins and I couldn't remote back in. But if I kept on attempting to ping the tunnel it would come back at the 10 min keep alive.

I had an old B315 I picked up off TradeMe that had the Spark Wireless firmware on it. So just swapped the sim into the B315, and so far it has been a lot more reliable where MIL has said the phone line hasn't been dropping and she has had far fewer issues.

Thankfully since I was part of the team who built the Fixed Wireless Voice solution 5 years ago after five weeks of having a grumpy MIL and trying to follow the proper path work via Level 1 support with numerous factory resets, and re-provisions of the device without success I have managed to escalate it to the right person who is looking into it now.

So watch this space, but anyone who is having this issues with Fixed Wireless Voice especially if they are using the Smart Modem 2... I would be really interested to know.

nztim

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#2940654 11-Jul-2022 11:22

BarTender:

Thankfully since I was part of the team who built the Fixed Wireless Voice solution 5 years ago after five weeks of having a grumpy MIL and trying to follow the proper path work via Level 1 support with numerous factory resets, and re-provisions of the device without success I have managed to escalate it to the right person who is looking into it now.

Peter you have never truly left Spark :)

Any views expressed on these forums are my own and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer.

BarTender

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#2942539 16-Jul-2022 09:02

nztim:

BarTender:

Thankfully since I was part of the team who built the Fixed Wireless Voice solution 5 years ago after five weeks of having a grumpy MIL and trying to follow the proper path work via Level 1 support with numerous factory resets, and re-provisions of the device without success I have managed to escalate it to the right person who is looking into it now.

Peter you have never truly left Spark :)

Tell.... me.... about.... it.... I've been out of there over 4 years now, and within the last 6 months I got an email saying "didn't you build x, do you remember how it worked??" And was able to fix the problem via email.

Jawa

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#2944081 20-Jul-2022 09:11

Late comer, but would like to add to this.

Earlier this year I was helping an elderly couple who had moved from a problematic copper landline over to a Spark Wireless landline with the Spark Smart Modem 2.

They were getting consistent problems much almost exactly the same as what TM89 reported.

Calls would not ring on their home line when the other end had a ring active.
If you tried to call out while in this state you either got no dial tone or if you proceeded to dial regardless the call would establish but no voices could be heard at either end.
A reboot of the modem would fix it initially but then break again after a random amount of time.
Didn't matter if I used an old corded handset or cordless, results were the same.
While I don't know if this is expected Wireless Landline behaviour or not, the ringing signal is a lot shorter than what it is on the copper landline. A typical signal would be two rings and a pause between, they would only get a single, may be even only three quarters of a single ring then the pause.

After a many of days and hours talking to their support team they were unable to figure out what was causing it. But through all the modem resets, restarts and testing I eventually managed to work out that it was the voice mail service that was causing the issue.

As long as there were no outstanding voice mails to be listened to the line would operate correctly as it should. As soon as someone left a voice message it would all go to crap.
This was all down to the 'message minder?' which informs you that there are voice mails in the mailbox (the thing that beeps three or four times when you first open the line).

A reboot of the modem would correct the issue and allow the message minder to work, you could then ring the mail box, clear the message and all will be fine till the next voice message is left.

I rang Spark back to explain in detail what the issue is to try solve it. I even had them remove the Voice Mail service from the package, left it 24 hours and had them re-enable it encase it was a bad configuration/setup but this did not resolve the problem. Further to this because I was helping this couple out after finishing work I was all ways talking to Spark around the 6pm mark when all their senior technicians had finished.

On multiple occasions I was told it would be escalated further up too them to investigate but never ended up getting responses, in the end I just abandoned the chasing the issue due to lack of progress and a lot of lost evenings. I informed the elderly couple to check their phone for voice messages twice a day and to clear them asap while also teaching them how to work around the issue when it does occur.

This was 3 months ago now, so cannot say whether it is still an issue but happy to check and resume testing if Spark are willing to put some serious effort into diagnosing it with me, and without me having to ring the support team each time, wait on hold and then go through the standard check list(which I did so politely every time) before having their own go at fixing the issue.