Is Telecom telling fibs?

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tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#71614 13-Nov-2010 23:09

Over the past month, we've been having broadband disconnections. We called Telecom and they did some stuff on the line and it stopped for a couple of days. Then they started again and they sent a Chorus guy out who turned up 2 days late. He fiddled with the cables in the grey tube on the fence line, and said it should be fixed. Right after he "finished" we suddenly got a lot of static on the land line and more frequent broadband drop outs. They sent the Chorus guy back and he did some work on the grey tube and at the little cabinet that was like a hundred metres or so away. They said that should fix it but it didn't. Our broadband speeds slowed right down, and we still had static on the line and drop outs.

A few days later they called us and said that there was a faulty cable in my area (Wattle Downs) and that about 1800 people had been affected. I dont believe this one bit. I have 2 mates who live about 300 meters either side of my house, neither of them had disconnections and static on the line or slow broadband. Telecom kept saying "it will be done this afternoon" and said this for 2 days and then said "honestly we dont know when its going to be fixed". My internet is now about an 8th of its normal speeds, and it refuses to load most images, and takes a good 2 minutes to buffer any streaming video and lots of downloads even time out before starting. Does anyone else live around wattle downs? are you having this problem too or is it actually just me and Telecom telling fibs?

Cheers, Sam.

Regs

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Snowflake

#404347 13-Nov-2010 23:45

have you eliminated problems within your house first? have you tried a different modem or splitter at your end? pulled all the phones out to see if there is any difference? I've seen dozens of people with these sort of problems find that their own equipment is at fault

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tardtasticx

3075 posts

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#404351 13-Nov-2010 23:55

Regs: have you eliminated problems within your house first? have you tried a different modem or splitter at your end? pulled all the phones out to see if there is any difference? I've seen dozens of people with these sort of problems find that their own equipment is at fault

yes we've tried different modems, we have a built in splitter where the line enters the house so the modem has its own jack point. Telecom hav'nt come into our house yet so I assume its a problem on their end.

Regs

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Snowflake

#404353 14-Nov-2010 00:09

try ask them to swap out your port on the exchange then. i've had a couple of dodgy ports at the exchange end in the past that have caused all the problems. never had a problem with the wiring inbetween (not that it cant happen though)

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Ragnor

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#404359 14-Nov-2010 00:27

Line faults can be tricky also the quality of chorus tech's can vary, keep lodging faults until it's fixed 100%.

Also worth asking the CSR politely whether there is any credit for having to deal with these faults. There's usually something they can throw in.

The french have an expression for situations like this:
C'est la vie, aka "that's life" aka "such is life".

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#404380 14-Nov-2010 07:17

Regs: try ask them to swap out your port on the exchange then. i've had a couple of dodgy ports at the exchange end in the past that have caused all the problems. never had a problem with the wiring inbetween (not that it cant happen though)

Yeh we've had the port changed when we first started getting disconnections. Didnt solve much

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#404381 14-Nov-2010 07:21

Ragnor: Line faults can be tricky also the quality of chorus tech's can vary, keep lodging faults until it's fixed 100%.

Also worth asking the CSR politely whether there is any credit for having to deal with these faults. There's usually something they can throw in.

The french have an expression for situations like this:
C'est la vie, aka "that's life" aka "such is life".

Oh yeh I will definitely be asking for an account credit after this. Maybe if its not fixed by today I'll tell them I want a data sim card to use in the time until its fixed lol

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#404460 14-Nov-2010 12:48

Just called Telecom again, they said they cant see any maintenance going on in my area so it must be finished but my speeds are still horrible. They told me to check the speeds on the modems web page thing and we got:

905kbps up
13.265kbps down and internet speed tests gave the same results

They said on their end for some reason that our max line speed has dropped from 21mbps to 16mbps and that from their end that is the speed they say we are getting. So they told us to run speed tests over the next 3 days and they'll look into it. This is ridiculous. It took me over a minute before this page was even in a browseable state. Facebook still refuses to load most pictures when it finally loads the basic page so I'm using the mobile site as I am doing with most other sites now.

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Technofreak

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#404576 14-Nov-2010 19:18

No, I don't think they are telling lies, though with the way their fault calls are handled I'm not sure they always get the full story. Don't get me started on Telecom using offshore call centres. Any time I need to call Telecom about something it is a major PITA, so much so I don't ring unless I absolutely at my wits end.

Your description of the fault sounds to me like a cable fault. I used to work for Telecom in a previous life. I suspect the first repair was from a faulty pair to a good cable pair that subsequently went faulty.

Individual pairs will go faulty from time to time. In this case is would seem that the cable might have been damaged and pairs were going faulty over a short period of time. With long spells of dry weather a cable could be damaged by someone cutting the plastic sheath on the cable and perhaps damaging the odd cable pair but the full extent of the damage not becoming really obvious until it rains and water starts to seep into the cable.

A cable fault can affect some customers in an area and not others. It depends on how the main cable is divided up to sevice the area, the fault might be in one lateral which is not servicing your friends.

As to why you still have poor internet speeds now that the fault is apparently fixed. There could be several reasons. Perhaps there were two faults in your area but they only found one of them or perhaps the Chorus guy did a work around to get you some service until the fault was repaired, and this work around is still in place. While this gave service at the time it is now impacting on your speeds.

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LAC

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Master Geek

#404582 14-Nov-2010 19:38

I had the some problem, come down to the modem tho. Hope you get your problem fixed, it annoyed me to. :(

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#406705 19-Nov-2010 12:30

ok, we found out its not the modem at fault for the speeds, but they still cant find whats causing the drop outs. The chorus guy that came around told us from the grey tube on the fence line that we get 7MegaBits/second from the cabinet. Previous chorus people have all told us we get atleast 20 and actual speeds are a little slower because of wires and stuff like that but we usually get around 16 which is fine. I called the help desk and asked about that and they said its probably because of usage, like people in our area using it a lot. I can understand that during the day but like even at night at say 4am we still get those same speeds, so unless someone is running a server farm next door 24/7 then I doubt thats the case. He told me "this is just the nature of broadband." How is that the nature of broadband to lose more than half your speed into nowhere for weeks?

Ragnor

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#406953 19-Nov-2010 23:27

tardtasticx: ok, we found out its not the modem at fault for the speeds, but they still cant find whats causing the drop outs. The chorus guy that came around told us from the grey tube on the fence line that we get 7MegaBits/second from the cabinet. Previous chorus people have all told us we get atleast 20 and actual speeds are a little slower because of wires and stuff like that but we usually get around 16 which is fine. I called the help desk and asked about that and they said its probably because of usage, like people in our area using it a lot. I can understand that during the day but like even at night at say 4am we still get those same speeds, so unless someone is running a server farm next door 24/7 then I doubt thats the case. He told me "this is just the nature of broadband." How is that the nature of broadband to lose more than half your speed into nowhere for weeks?

Are you talking about speedtest results or line/sync rate the modem is connecting at?

Speedtests and general performance will of course vary because that is the nature of residential grade broadband, you don't get dedicated bandwidth (because that costs thousands per month) you have backhaul, domestic and international bandwidth shared between users.

What are the modem stats: line rate, attenuation, SNR, noise margin?

Also, do you know how far you are from the exchange/cabinet you are connected to?

tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#406961 20-Nov-2010 00:07

Ragnor:
tardtasticx: ok, we found out its not the modem at fault for the speeds, but they still cant find whats causing the drop outs. The chorus guy that came around told us from the grey tube on the fence line that we get 7MegaBits/second from the cabinet. Previous chorus people have all told us we get atleast 20 and actual speeds are a little slower because of wires and stuff like that but we usually get around 16 which is fine. I called the help desk and asked about that and they said its probably because of usage, like people in our area using it a lot. I can understand that during the day but like even at night at say 4am we still get those same speeds, so unless someone is running a server farm next door 24/7 then I doubt thats the case. He told me "this is just the nature of broadband." How is that the nature of broadband to lose more than half your speed into nowhere for weeks?

Are you talking about speedtest results or line/sync rate the modem is connecting at?

Speedtests and general performance will of course vary because that is the nature of residential grade broadband, you don't get dedicated bandwidth (because that costs thousands per month) you have backhaul, domestic and international bandwidth shared between users.

What are the modem stats: line rate, attenuation, SNR, noise margin?

Also, do you know how far you are from the exchange/cabinet you are connected to?

Managed to get my mate to lend an old modem to me for today, tried it out, BAM. speeds back to 11MBits/s. So I called the help desk and got a ref. number and got modem replaced at the mall and its fine now with speeds 10MBit/s > and fluctuating and a reasonable rate. Those speeds before that I said the Chorus person was getting, they were from the grey tube on the property line. Before the line even touches our house. We are probably >150M away from the roadside cabinet? Around that region. And how do I get the modem stats? We have a new version of modem now, a v8 and the interface is really gross. Can't even change the date, thinks its 1st Jan. 2000

Regs

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Snowflake

#406970 20-Nov-2010 00:21

tardtasticx:
Regs: have you eliminated problems within your house first? have you tried a different modem or splitter at your end? pulled all the phones out to see if there is any difference? I've seen dozens of people with these sort of problems find that their own equipment is at fault

yes we've tried different modems, we have a built in splitter where the line enters the house so the modem has its own jack point. Telecom hav'nt come into our house yet so I assume its a problem on their end.

tardtasticx:
Managed to get my mate to lend an old modem to me for today, tried it out, BAM. speeds back to 11MBits/s.

so just who is telling fibs then?

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tardtasticx

3075 posts

Uber Geek

#406972 20-Nov-2010 00:28

Regs:
tardtasticx:
Regs: have you eliminated problems within your house first? have you tried a different modem or splitter at your end? pulled all the phones out to see if there is any difference? I've seen dozens of people with these sort of problems find that their own equipment is at fault

yes we've tried different modems, we have a built in splitter where the line enters the house so the modem has its own jack point. Telecom hav'nt come into our house yet so I assume its a problem on their end.

tardtasticx:
Managed to get my mate to lend an old modem to me for today, tried it out, BAM. speeds back to 11MBits/s.

so just who is telling fibs then?

I dont know, thats what the chorus guy told me, that he got those speeds at the tube and obv. he didn't. Plus the modem is from them so its still their issue supplying the crap hardware. Anyways it seems problem is over then. Thanks for help.