Overall February was not a good month for broadband connection up-time. All seemed to be fine till around the middle of the month, just after I renewed my contract with BT (now why did I do that?). Then I had a number of days of really low connection speeds.
However, after only two calls to the BT broadband support line and despite my assurances that that there was no technical issue with my local equipment as per my many previous telephone calls, I had a booked visit from one of the BT Openreach broadband engineers.
He duly arrived on the 22nd February and made some local tests and found (as I suspected) no fault with my equipment. However he did find via some diagnostics that he carried that the Line Profile (also known as the B-RAS setting) at the local exchange (Reading South) was incorrectly set.
The B-RAS setting is used to determine the download speed of the circuit and will adjust itself if the line is affected by noise which I had noticed (and the engineer also heard) a few days before I first called in the fault. Why had I not noticed the noise problem earlier – I have two lines, one of which is only used for broadband.
As always with technology, you learn new things, 1) about the B-RAS setting, 2) via the engineers diagnostics that my router is exactly 3.8 km from the exchange as the wire goes (as opposed to as the Crow flies) and 3) there are an average of 16 connections (the roadside BT boxes – green ones where I live) between a home phone /router and an exchange!
Anyway the resetting of the B-RAS level seemed to bring the speed back up to near what I have been experiencing at the beginning of February and apart from a couple of ‘normal’ blips seems to have stabilised back around the 4.2Mb level. Of course, nowhere near the impossible 8MB still being offered by all the ISP’s – when will Ofcom step in and end this mis-selling?
Lets see what happens in March!
Beasley's Place 