Fibre up 24 hrs

kleefarr

Had it installed yesterday about 1:30pm.
Speeds are an improvement but again we have bad lagging issues especially when the boys are on xbox live.

When I was on the old adsl 8mb speed, we had the same thing, anything from a SNR down of 6-8 db which I guessed was causing the problem.

Now we are getting a reading of 5 db down.

Do I need to wait a few days for it to settle down or should I start trying something now?

ED E

Call vodafone and have them reprofile you to the next one down. Your DS is mangling data, real world performance should be a lot better at 40_10.

kleefarr

Thanks Ed.
Will contact them Monday.

I am only 490m from cab though, should shouldn't I be getting better results?

kaizersoze

kleefarr wrote: »

Thanks Ed.
Will contact them Monday.

I am only 490m from cab though, should shouldn't I be getting better results?

I'm 500m from the cab and getting 81 down/20 up with Eircom.

The first couple of days I was on a 50/20 profile though because of a bad prequal. I gave it a few days until my prequal improved and contacted them via Twitter. They upped it to the highest profile for my line.

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

Thanks Ed.
Will contact them Monday.

I am only 490m from cab though, should shouldn't I be getting better results?

Cables don't route in straight lines, also, there could be metres of cable coiled up in the manholes. After 600m there's a huge drop in speeds on VDSL

kleefarr

kaizersoze wrote: »

I'm 500m from the cab and getting 81 down/20 up with Eircom.

The first couple of days I was on a 50/20 profile though because of a bad prequal. I gave it a few days until my prequal improved and contacted them via Twitter. They upped it to the highest profile for my line.

Interesting. What is prequal?

mass_debater wrote: »

Cables don't route in straight lines, also, there could be metres of cable coiled up in the manholes. After 600m there's a huge drop in speeds on VDSL

Makes sense. But as kaizersoze has said above, sounds like I should not be expecting to go down in speed as they told me I could have 50mb when signing up.

Bog Standard User

3 possible issues causing that poor snr

1. Line Fault - Either a major short fault at the ntu or a major earth fault outside)
2. Bridge Tapped line - (Bridge tapped lines is a line shared between two houses - was fine for adsl but no good for vdsl as both houses get half the bandwidth) so basically the line can take 80mb but each house gets 40mb
3. RFI on your line - Radio Frequency Interference - the line is picking up interference from either a high voltage line or some high power transmission system nearby)

at 490m you should be able to get 70 - 80mb

i'd ask for a tech to come out to test and fix your line

AyanPrince

there could be metres of cable coiled up in the manholes. After 600m there's a huge drop in speeds on VDSL




_______________
Arslan1

mass_debater

Bog Standard User wrote: »

2. Bridge Tapped line - (Bridge tapped lines is a line shared between two houses - was fine for adsl but no good for vdsl as both houses get half the bandwidth) so basically the line can take 80mb but each house gets 40mb

Eircom never tapped like this, every house gets a two pair dropwire and this goes to a distribution point. Bridge taps occur inside your house where the main pair is teed into before the NTU. The main pair has to feed the NTU before the rest of the sockets in the house, the sockets must be back feed from the NTU so they are filtered.

kleefarr

6 months ago on the old ADSL set up, they came out and tested the line and said there was nothing wrong.
When applying for the fibre upgrade they told me I would get 50mb. This would indicate that they had checked the line and come up with a safe speed for me.

Downstream SNR has been 4.6 for the last 24hrs +.

When they test the line speed I assume that there is no indication of the quality of the line just the speed that it can handle?

ED E

Prequals give an estimated max. Its not uncommon to have to undershoot it by one.

kleefarr

Yes that's what I would have thought to be on the 'safe' side.
So they probably came up with a profile of 60/20 when tested originally then.

Something wrong somewhere and it does not seem to be in house according to the tests they carried out 6 months ago.

kaizersoze

kleefarr wrote: »

6 months ago on the old ADSL set up, they came out and tested the line and said there was nothing wrong.
When applying for the fibre upgrade they told me I would get 50mb. This would indicate that they had checked the line and come up with a safe speed for me.

Downstream SNR has been 4.6 for the last 24hrs +.

When they test the line speed I assume that there is no indication of the quality of the line just the speed that it can handle?

These are my stats....
VDSL Port Details Upstream Downstream
Line Rate: 20.341 Mbps 79.985 Mbps
Actual Net Data Rate: 20.305 Mbps 79.847 Mbps
Trellis Coding: ON ON
SNR Margin: 6.1 dB 6.1 dB
Actual Delay: 7 ms 7 ms
Transmit Power: 0.6 dBm 13.0 dBm
Receive Power: -18.4 dBm -9.3 dBm
Actual INP: 2.0 symbols 2.0 symbols
Total Attenuation: 18.9 dB 22.4 dB
Attainable Net Data Rate: 21.634 Mbps 90.400 Mbps

kleefarr

That is not a particularly high SNR margin either. Although it is higher than mine at the moment. Do you do much gaming on that connection?

kaizersoze

kleefarr wrote: »

That is not a particularly high SNR noise margin either. Although it is higher than mine at the moment. Do you do much gaming on that connection?

Zero gaming.

kleefarr

Finally got around to asking them to drop my profile down to 40/10 and they have just done it.

Downstream line rate (kbit/s) 40956
Upstream line rate (kbit/s) 10239
Downstream SNR (dB) 10
Upstream SNR (dB) 20.2

Looks ok so far.

kleefarr

Ok, since the profile reduction, can you believe it...... LAG actually seems worse.



I am guessing, just as my first suspicions months ago, that this is more than a profile issue.

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

Ok, since the profile reduction, can you believe it...... LAG actually seems worse.



I am guessing, just as my first suspicions months ago, that this is more than a profile issue.

Crazy amount of error correction going on there, something's not right. Was your main pair redirected, i.e. the NTU moved? Are you back feeding a phone over the same cable as the fibre comes in on another pair? Do you have an ETU (external box), if so remove the NTU and fit it to the pair at the ETU and see how it performs there

kleefarr

mass_debater wrote: »

Crazy amount of error correction going on there, something's not right. Was your main pair redirected, i.e. the NTU moved? Are you back feeding a phone over the same cable as the fibre comes in on another pair? Do you have an ETU (external box), if so remove the NTU and fit it to the pair at the ETU and see how it performs there

No idea what you mean about all that.

Ordered Fibre.
Engineer came out did a couple of tests.
Went to cabinet.
Came back.
Connected.
50/20 as shown in first post.

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

No idea what you mean about all that.

Ordered Fibre.
Engineer came out did a couple of tests.
Went to cabinet.
Came back.
Connected.
50/20 as shown in first post.

Do you have an ETU? If so do what I said above to eliminate there being a problem with your own internal cabling. If it's fine at the ETU then there's a problem with your own cabling they will offer to run a new cable from the ETU to a new NTU. You need to find where the black Eircom dropwire ends and test there, it could even be in the attic depending on the age of the house.

kleefarr

mass_debater wrote: »

Do you have an ETU? If so do what I said above to eliminate there being a problem with your own internal cabling. If it's fine at the ETU then there's a problem with your own cabling they will offer to run a new cable from the ETU to a new NTU. You need to find where the black Eircom dropwire ends and test there, it could even be in the attic depending on the age of the house.

They tested the internal wiring and said there was no problem. But then they also tested the line coming into the house and said there was no problem.

The main socket comes in at the front door.
What is an ETU?

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

They tested the internal wiring and said there was no problem. But then they also tested the line coming into the house and said there was no problem.

The main socket comes in at the front door.
What is an ETU?

External termination unit, it's a smaller version of the ESB meter cabinet. If your cable comes in the front door it's most likely you've not got one.

You might need to get them to replace the dropwire and possibly build you a new path to the cab. You are at a huge disadvantage being a Vodafone customer, the tech Eircom send will not want to touch your internal cabling, will most likely put his meter on the NTU, confirm it's working take a photo and disappear. Sounds like they already did this

notahappycamper

I'm having similar problems - see attached pic. Couple of Eircom techs out who separated the line i.e. we have 2 sockets in use and a dialler on the alarm that uses the phone line. Broadband disconnects at least once a day - loads of errors although I thought the higher amount of CRC errors are worse than FEC errors. Anyway, I'm getting commbiz.ie out to look at the internal wiring.

kleefarr

mass_debater wrote: »

External termination unit, it's a smaller version of the ESB meter cabinet. If your cable comes in the front door it's most likely you've not got one.

You might need to get them to replace the dropwire and possibly build you a new path to the cab. You are at a huge disadvantage being a Vodafone customer, the tech Eircom send will not want to touch your internal cabling, will most likely put his meter on the NTU, confirm it's working take a photo and disappear. Sounds like they already did this

Is the line to the house not Eircoms responsibility?
I should get them to fix if so.

notahappycamper wrote: »

I'm having similar problems - see attached pic. Couple of Eircom techs out who separated the line i.e. we have 2 sockets in use and a dialler on the alarm that uses the phone line. Broadband disconnects at least once a day - loads of errors although I thought the higher amount of CRC errors are worse than FEC errors. Anyway, I'm getting commbiz.ie out to look at the internal wiring.

Are commbiz a private company? What's that costing you?

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

Is the line to the house not Eircoms responsibility?
I should get them to fix if so.

Yes but getting Eircom to accept there is a problem is the hard bit, remember you are not their customer.

notahappycamper

kleefarr wrote: »

Is the line to the house not Eircoms responsibility?
I should get them to fix if so.



Are commbiz a private company? What's that costing you?

Yeah they are. Not sure what they'll charge.

kleefarr

mass_debater wrote: »

Yes but getting Eircom to accept there is a problem is the hard bit, remember you are not their customer.

Indirectly we all are, via payment from whichever provider we use that pay Eircom for the line rental.

notahappycamper wrote: »

Yeah they are. Not sure what they'll charge.

Let me know how it goes please.

lucernarian

Everybody who has broadband problems and a phone alarm, especially with eFibre: Hand the techie this or make sure yourselves it's wired this way!! http://www.reci.ie/Portals/0/Documents/eircominterface.pdf

This is very important and the only way that both the alarm will work according to spec AND your broadband speed won't suffer.


Anyway, I find it hard to believe but I got my family's line tested and the exchange based test indicated a bridge tap at about 4.5 km (line is over 6 km long.) As it's not near the exchange or the modem it doesn't make much if any difference in that case as 3 mbit is still reliably achieved. Bridge taps or spurs on lines are a much bigger issue near the socket (like with extension sockets wired incorrectly when it was okay for voice or especially phone monitored alarms).

mass_debater

lucernarian wrote: »

Everybody who has broadband problems and a phone alarm, especially with eFibre: Hand the techie this or make sure yourselves it's wired this way!! http://www.reci.ie/Portals/0/Documents/eircominterface.pdf

This is very important and the only way that both the alarm will work according to spec AND your broadband speed won't suffer.

Re alarm, only if it's an Eircom Phonewatch alarm that has a feed and return, an alarm from a private alarm company could have it's own filter and need to be backfed with the rest of the phone sockets

jasper1

I think this is a RECI guideline for all autodialler alarms that use a fixed line

mass_debater

jasper1 wrote: »

I think this is a RECI guideline for all autodialler alarms that use a fixed line

It's also completely outdated advising people to loop a three pair phone cable from room to room instead of at least cat5e all returning to a central location which should be the standard guideline. I've come across lots of situations where clueless electricians loop cat5e from room to room expecting it's the right thing to do.

ED E

As a sidenote Eircom Phonewatch now = Sector Alarm Phonewatch and they're moving to a GSM only solution.

And even more importantly, eircom are killing the fixed SMS service like next month(?) so any eircom customers alarms wont be able to send texts. AFAIK it doesnt effect Vodafone or Sky.

KoolKid

Vodafone & Sky land lines use Eircom lines . AFAIK the text service will be removed from them also.
Most alarm systems we do now are IP based anyway.

ED E

KoolKid wrote: »

Vodafone & Sky land lines use Eircom lines . AFAIK the text service will be removed from them also.
Most alarm systems we do now are IP based anyway.

It depends if the feature is being turned off on the PSTN service units themselves, or eircom Retail are just shutting down their messaging server for fixed line accounts. Unless vodafone & sky have written to their users too its safe to assume its the latter.

notahappycamper

ED E wrote: »

It depends if the feature is being turned off on the PSTN service units themselves, or eircom Retail are just shutting down their messaging server for fixed line accounts. Unless vodafone & sky have written to their users too its safe to assume its the latter.

30th June is the date they are meant to be turning it off. I'd be very surprised if it will affect just Eircom customers. Do they not all use the same messaging centres for fixed line SMS?

KoolKid

notahappycamper wrote: »

30th June is the date they are meant to be turning it off. I'd be very surprised if it will affect just Eircom customers. Do they not all use the same messaging centres for fixed line SMS?

They were all the one message centre number.

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

ED E

Few things to point out here.

Firstly, a higher signalling rate will inevitably, under the same levels of stress, produce higher error counts. Suppose a 1% corruption rate, on a link that sends 1000 datagrams a second vs a link that sends 100 datagrams a second you will see a 10x error counter for the same uptime. One is no worse than the other, just the figures will be higher. To that end, if you see 1k FEC on a 1Mb ADSL link with 5 mins uptime, you might be concerned, but on a 90Mb VDSL link its likely not a problem.

Next up, from memory, the 658c targets 9dB, while the F1000 targets 10dB. Looks like a small difference, but as you know its logarithmic, so a 10dB signal is ~130% the strenght of a 9dB one (simplification, but lets roll with it). Significant enough when lines are by default set to the prequal and allowed to rate adapt. Eircom are now using a 659b I hear, but no idea what the FW on that targets.

Lastly the PTM link(where FEC and CRC corrections are done) is only between CPE and DSLAM*, after that its IPoE traffic(or possibly L2TP tunnels) so nothing vodafone or any other operator did from their traffic handoff point would impact those figures.

*EDIT: Might actually be the aggregation node, but same applies.

lucernarian

mass_debater wrote: »

It's also completely outdated advising people to loop a three pair phone cable from room to room instead of at least cat5e all returning to a central location which should be the standard guideline.

There are no direct comparisons that I could find between a 3-pair UTP cable (like the CW1308 spec) and Cat5e cable peformance but the difference over e.g. 10 metres from ETP to NTP is going to be small. Also extension sockets, when used with a filtered NTP, can use regular twisted pair just fine as they will never be used for xDSL to a modem. Cat5e being laid allows for ethernet connections alongside it, but rather than sacrificing gigabit speeds and having to rip open the sheathing to bring one pair to one socket and another two pairs to the other socket, surely cheap CW1308 or even alarm wire could easily be run alongside Cat5 at little extra cost?

Most importantly, although it's great there being filters which attenuate in-band noise in those NTUs, they don't magically stop it all. And a star configuration from a master socket will still result in several bridge taps located right beside the modem, albeit all attenuated at maybe 25dB when off-hook. But the "bridge tap" extensions will still have an additive effect and quite possibly be of a similar length in a star configuration which further worsens the problem.

mass_debater

lucernarian wrote: »

There are no direct comparisons that I could find between a 3-pair UTP cable (like the CW1308 spec) and Cat5e cable peformance but the difference over e.g. 10 metres from ETP to NTP is going to be small. Also extension sockets, when used with a filtered NTP, can use regular twisted pair just fine as they will never be used for xDSL to a modem. Cat5e being laid allows for ethernet connections alongside it, but rather than sacrificing gigabit speeds and having to rip open the sheathing to bring one pair to one socket and another two pairs to the other socket, surely cheap CW1308 or even alarm wire could easily be run alongside Cat5 at little extra cost?

Most importantly, although it's great there being filters which attenuate in-band noise in those NTUs, they don't magically stop it all. And a star configuration from a master socket will still result in several bridge taps located right beside the modem, albeit all attenuated at maybe 25dB when off-hook. But the "bridge tap" extensions will still have an additive effect and quite possibly be of a similar length in a star configuration which further worsens the problem.

You're missing my point is we should be putting some thought into cabling our houses with at least gigabit Ethernet in mind, the guidelines only consider phone and are outdated. I see customers jaws drop when I tell them the cabling installed in their houses is of little use for broadband beyond the first socket it loops to but their electrician says they followed the guidelines and used the better cat5e cable.

notahappycamper

yuloni wrote: »

I must say, this is a common observation I've made on a large number of Vodafone DSL connections. In my example, all are short lines (<500m to 2.5KM), all holding a perfect sync, all with a good, steady SNR margin but all showing CRC errors and very high FEC counts. All these connections use the Vodafone issued Huawei HG658c gateway running the VF firmware

I've chased Vodafone in almost all of these instances and while some lines were tested and found that yes, there is a line fault (obvious from poor browsing performance), the majority of the lines are coming back OK, browsing performance is OK just there is a lot of error correction happening

I know from reading around that most will tell you not to worry about high FEC, only high CRC. Also, I think it might have been one of you mentioned here that very high FEC on VDSL can occur as there are many more data packets traversing the link. However, I'm not satisfied that this is normal and I was putting it down to either a fault in the HG658c or that perhaps Vodafone were doing something strange further up their network which was botching end connections. But with that said, I have a Vodafone DSL connection myself running on a HG658c with not a single CRC or FEC occurrence since it was installed

It's a hard one to nail

It is a hard one to nail alright! Look at my stats for a DSL up time of 2 days!!

Nonoperational

When G.INP was enabled the FEC errors reported on the Vodafone unit increased exponentially. I'm not convinced they are an accurate reporting of whats going on.

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

kleefarr

I posted to my long running thread on the Vodafone site and recently got a text from Vodafone saying they are having their Technical Team look into it, again.

Vodafone thread

Nonoperational

Few things.


The screen shot shows the VDSL connected for over 22 hours with 190 CRC errors. That's not bad and not consistent with a regularly dropping connection. What issues exactly are you having? You posted a speedtest with a ping of 21. That's fine.

What kind of NAT is xbox live reporting? Have you tried changing the wifi channels and connecting directly with ethernet to see if it's a wifi issue?

Based on your attenuation you're syncing at a speed I'd expect. FEC errors are always high on Vodafone boxes after G.INP was implemented. Mine is the same.

To be honest I don't think there's any huge problem with your line. I think it's more likely there's something causing a bit of RF interference periodically which is affecting the SNR and increasing the error count a bit or an equipment issue on your end. If you are syncing at 40Mbit with 10dB SNR that's perfectly fine for your attenuation.

kleefarr

I had only recently rebooted the modem after a long bout of lag.
All equipment ie cordless phones and all other wireless capable devices where disconnected and switched off when tests were done.
Even now, it says it is syncing at just over 40956 kbits/s but net is really slow.

The figures look good but the performance isn't matching up. Two sons playing xbox live and moaning all the time about lag is enough to slowly drive anyone mad.

Will check the NAT on xbox tomorrow.

kleefarr

yuloni wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Any chance of a copy of the O2 Firmware? Or would using it affect my contract with Vodafone?

mass_debater

kleefarr wrote: »

I had only recently rebooted the modem after a long bout of lag.
All equipment ie cordless phones and all other wireless capable devices where disconnected and switched off when tests were done.
Even now, it says it is syncing at just over 40956 kbits/s but net is really slow.

The figures look good but the performance isn't matching up. Two sons playing xbox live and moaning all the time about lag is enough to slowly drive anyone mad.

Will check the NAT on xbox tomorrow.

I hope you are testing over Ethernet. Run a few pings from command line and post screenshots

yuloni

This post has been deleted.

kleefarr

There is a hold on all tests.

Eircom just rang and are calling around later.

kleefarr

kleefarr wrote: »

There is a hold on all tests.

Eircom just rang and are calling around later.

The tech team have confirmed that there is a fault somewhere on the connection, so the engineers have been notified.

Engineer says that there are 2 problems 1. A bridge tap 2. Problem with line coming to house.