I have had VDSL working extremely well for more than 1.5 years connected to new Whisper cabinet installed in June 2014. DLM kindly puts us on the 17A profile with no issues and nice 58/10 Mbps (997) speeds.
VDSL equipment is a Netgear R7000 router connected through a Draytek DV130 modem in bridge mode, both on UPS's. The Draytek-130 is rock solid and never loses the VDSL connection unless Chorus or Spark maintenance is done.
I have had 2-3 occasions where our broadband has been out for an extended period which required calling ISP (Spark) support after both modem and router reboot attempts failed to reconnect.
During these extended outages, the modem VDSL connection has always remained connected showing no errors. The problem seems to be that the the PPPoE connection to my ISP account is locked out.
After contacting ISP broadband support, the operator seems to have access to a tool that either 'resets' or 'refreshes' the DSLAM port. The router will immediately connect when this is done and we are back online.
However, when the port is reset/refreshed by ISP staff, we lose the 17A profile immediately and the modem drops back to 8B but it stays on DLM-1 with a reported ping of 6ms. (It will take at least a month to 6 weeks before DLM bumps us back up to 17A)
This week I attempted to install a replacement Netgear R7000 router a few times. Every time I connected the new router it refused to connect to the ISP and appeared to lock the DSLAM port. When the original router was reconnected, it too would not reconnect until I called ISP support.
ISP support once again reset/refreshed the port to get a connection and we lost our 17A profile again.
My questions are:
1. What is the correct term - are DSLAM ports 'reset' or 'refreshed' ?
2. Do ISP support staff actually have access to a tool to do this in our cabinet ?
3. Should ISP support staff be brute force refreshing/resetting customer DSLAM ports when modems are clearly already connected with no DSL issues rather than finding a less brutal solution ?
4. Why does, the DSLAM port not reset itself, or is there procedure that can be followed that will allow the port to reset itself ?
5. Any ideas on why my port is locking up in the first place by simply fitting a new router would also be most appreciated ?
