My apologies for the long post, but I wanted to provide some background info on my problem and the resolutions already explored before asking for help. My questions are in the last paragraph.
I've recently "upgraded" from ADSL2 to FTTC on the two BT phone lines to my house. The sync rates for down are approximately 50% of their lowest estimate and the up is barely 20%. Both experience regularly falls of greater than 25%, and the lost packets make them unusable for gaming. During any cold, wet or windy weather the losses increase (approximately 5-10% losses and sometimes enough to drop the PPPoE connection to the ISP forcing a reconnect). When on ADSL the lines were rock-solid and syncing at 17.5 down and 1.4 up. (I believe the up was due to "Annex M", but my terminology may be incorrect.)
The service contracts I took out have a guaranteed fault tolerance which is exceeded when BTOR reset the profiles for the lines, but over the following week will always drop below the tolerance again as the packet losses presumably indicate some detectable fault condition so the equipment drops the sync rates down to try and find a stable level. Without the stability they are almost useless as gaming, online video streaming, or anything else of that nature is badly affected.
Because I have the two lines my ISP had to log two different faults to get a BTOR engineer to look at each line. That meant I have had three different engineers attend over the past few days to look at them. All three have extensively tested the lines and various joints were remade at the pole where one was apparently wet. This made no noticeable difference.
Each engineer mentioned that their tests indicated it is likely to be down to the line between the pole and the cabinet 300m away which in their opinion was likely aluminium, slightly degraded after 45 years of use, and couldn't carry the VDSL signals adequately. Apparently other customers in my area have complained about the same thing. They were each mentioned requesting a different team come out to look at replacing the line between the cabinet and the pole, however in my opinion (and theirs) that is very unlikely to happen as BTOR won't spend money when they can just cancel the contract with my ISP without penalty for much less lost. I understand that BT lines are only guaranteed to carry voice signals, which they do with only very intermittent noise (slight crackles *very* occasionally and never when doing a line test).
So at the moment I am left with an average of three re-syncs daily as the line tries to drop down to a stable level, fails, and then drops further. I am hoping that it will find a stable level above ADSL speeds otherwise I will be forced to cancel and return to the rock-solid ADSL (they will revert at no cost to me under my service contract).
I asked the last engineer if I could get a survey done to price up replace the line at my cost, but he said that BTOR would not carry out work privately for costs. I asked if getting a third line to my house would force the cable to be replaced as apparently there are no spare pairs to my pole, but he said they would likely just route a pair from a different pole with spare pairs. I couldn't even get a leased ethernet line from the exchange because once that service contract had ended they would not be able to reuse it for VDSL. FTTP (or FTTPoD) are not available from my cabinet, and in any rate the stupidly-low usage caps on them make them next-to-useless for a family of four all streaming Netflix and playing games.
So finally on to my question:
Are there any keywords or phrases that can be used to get BTOR to either replace the cable themselves, or provide a survey to cost it up for me to pay? I'm surprised they said they wouldn't be able to do the latter as surely a new housing development would pay to have the BT infrastructure installed at their cost? How is that different to FTTPoD? Can I use that as a way of getting new copper lines installed at the same time as fibre, even though they don't offer FTTPoD from my cabinet? I don't want FTTP due to the low usage caps but I would pay for it if it meant I could get the copper replaced at the same time for the FTTC services. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
I've recently "upgraded" from ADSL2 to FTTC on the two BT phone lines to my house. The sync rates for down are approximately 50% of their lowest estimate and the up is barely 20%. Both experience regularly falls of greater than 25%, and the lost packets make them unusable for gaming. During any cold, wet or windy weather the losses increase (approximately 5-10% losses and sometimes enough to drop the PPPoE connection to the ISP forcing a reconnect). When on ADSL the lines were rock-solid and syncing at 17.5 down and 1.4 up. (I believe the up was due to "Annex M", but my terminology may be incorrect.)
The service contracts I took out have a guaranteed fault tolerance which is exceeded when BTOR reset the profiles for the lines, but over the following week will always drop below the tolerance again as the packet losses presumably indicate some detectable fault condition so the equipment drops the sync rates down to try and find a stable level. Without the stability they are almost useless as gaming, online video streaming, or anything else of that nature is badly affected.
Because I have the two lines my ISP had to log two different faults to get a BTOR engineer to look at each line. That meant I have had three different engineers attend over the past few days to look at them. All three have extensively tested the lines and various joints were remade at the pole where one was apparently wet. This made no noticeable difference.
Each engineer mentioned that their tests indicated it is likely to be down to the line between the pole and the cabinet 300m away which in their opinion was likely aluminium, slightly degraded after 45 years of use, and couldn't carry the VDSL signals adequately. Apparently other customers in my area have complained about the same thing. They were each mentioned requesting a different team come out to look at replacing the line between the cabinet and the pole, however in my opinion (and theirs) that is very unlikely to happen as BTOR won't spend money when they can just cancel the contract with my ISP without penalty for much less lost. I understand that BT lines are only guaranteed to carry voice signals, which they do with only very intermittent noise (slight crackles *very* occasionally and never when doing a line test).
So at the moment I am left with an average of three re-syncs daily as the line tries to drop down to a stable level, fails, and then drops further. I am hoping that it will find a stable level above ADSL speeds otherwise I will be forced to cancel and return to the rock-solid ADSL (they will revert at no cost to me under my service contract).
I asked the last engineer if I could get a survey done to price up replace the line at my cost, but he said that BTOR would not carry out work privately for costs. I asked if getting a third line to my house would force the cable to be replaced as apparently there are no spare pairs to my pole, but he said they would likely just route a pair from a different pole with spare pairs. I couldn't even get a leased ethernet line from the exchange because once that service contract had ended they would not be able to reuse it for VDSL. FTTP (or FTTPoD) are not available from my cabinet, and in any rate the stupidly-low usage caps on them make them next-to-useless for a family of four all streaming Netflix and playing games.
So finally on to my question:
Are there any keywords or phrases that can be used to get BTOR to either replace the cable themselves, or provide a survey to cost it up for me to pay? I'm surprised they said they wouldn't be able to do the latter as surely a new housing development would pay to have the BT infrastructure installed at their cost? How is that different to FTTPoD? Can I use that as a way of getting new copper lines installed at the same time as fibre, even though they don't offer FTTPoD from my cabinet? I don't want FTTP due to the low usage caps but I would pay for it if it meant I could get the copper replaced at the same time for the FTTC services. Any suggestions would be welcomed.