Vodafone's 'Sure Signal' no longer effective

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SepticSceptic

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#1693081 21-Dec-2016 09:10

A Conklin is one of the first ADSL exchanges, most have been replaced, but many remain in rural areas.

You can generally tell if you are on a Conklin exchange as that your download speed in the evening diminishes as more and more customers use the ADSL connections to that Conklin cabinet. In other words, internet browsing takes longer for pages to download, and you can forget about streaming any kind of video.

If you are using torrents, you'll see the data transfer speed drop from around 1-4 Mb/s to well below 1Mb/s in the evenings.

When you reset your Sure Signal, do you hold in the reset button for 30 seconds, and then release ?

hio77

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#1693084 21-Dec-2016 09:14

SepticSceptic:

If you are using torrents, you'll see the data transfer speed drop from around 1-4 Mb/s to well below 1Mb/s in the evenings.

not sure torrents are the best advise to give as to testing speeds, there is way to many variables ontop of just raw speed to seriously use it as a metric.

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timmmay

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#1693090 21-Dec-2016 09:35

Ah, rural, that's probably pretty key, it could be exchange congestion. I would try to put in place some kind of monitoring of your connection, even just monitoring ping times or web page download speeds. PRTG is pretty easy to use on Windows, and is free for < 100 monitors - you'd just need ping and maybe a couple of web pages downloaded every 10 minutes. Nagios on any machine, R.Pi, but it's a nightmare to configure. Even ping -t piped into a text file, opened with Excel, might work.

RunningMan

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#1693156 21-Dec-2016 11:27

bramwell:[snip]

We have investigated your Vodafone Sure Signal issue and there are no network issues on our end. After analysing your line, we found a continuous stream of upload usage which is the likely cause of degraded call performance. Please check the background programs e.g. cloud services, P2P etc on your devices. Thanks - Vodafone Team.

This really is the key. VF have clearly done some quite reasonable troubleshooting. The suresignal has to compete with everything else in your house for bandwidth on the internet connection. If it can't get data through the connection fast enough, some essentially gets thrown out, and bits of the call will be dropped.

xDSL home broadband connections are asymmetric - The download bandwidth is usually much greater than the upload. This means it is far easier for the upload (data being sent from your house) to get choked up when it is busy. A continuous stream of something being uploaded (sent) to the internet will take up all the available bandwidth on your connection, leaving nothing left for the suresignal. What Vodafone are saying, is that it is something on your specific connection that is sending this data - it won't affect your neighbours, because they aren't uploading something continuously.

As others have mentioned, in a rural area, you may find your connection speeds are slower than urban - the slower connection means you reach this choke point much sooner.

It's a matter of trying to determine what is sending a continuous stream over your internet connection. As mentioned earlier, the most obvious are intentional things you have turned on - torrents, iCloud syncing photos between devices, cloud backups, google drive etc - anything that stores data remotely. An email stuck in an outbox repeatedly trying to send could do it. It could also be a virus or malware, either on a computer or other device you have, or even some routers have exploits that could account for this.

Basically, it will probably be trial and error to work out what it is - turning all the devices off at home, and back on one at a time until the problem re-occurs. Just to make it difficult, it probably won't happen immediately a device is turned back on, so try each combination of devices on/off for several hours until the pattern is worked out - then troubleshoot the problem device.

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