Phone line static influencing DSL quality

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Aug 09, 2005 at 10:34:13AM -0500, Sy wrote:
> I may as well bring this up.  Has anyone else experienced severe line
> noise influencing a DSL connection?

My DSL service when I lived on the 21th floor of an appartment building
was certainly not great.  Dropped sync frequently, never got beyond
about 600kbps connection.  I suspect replacing the wiring in the walls
of the building woudl have helped, but that didn't seem like an option.
Not like Bell or the ISP is at fault in any way if the building has
garbage phone wire.

> This is the case with me, and I've escalated the problem a few times
> and even had an ill-equipped and misinformed tech drop by
> (unannounced).
> 
> I have repairs semi-arranged.. but I wanted to know if, aside from the
> obvious, there were any system / firewall settings or the like which
> might make my experience a little better.
> 
> Running Sympatico regular DSL on a Bell line.  I've done the obvious
> stuff with the handset/wiring and whatnot.  At this point it's all in
> the preferences for my own setup I figure.
> 
> I exchanged my modem for another one which seems to be much more
> aggressive with reconnecting during downtime.  I occasionally stay
> connected but lose any actual use of the connection.  Sometimes I drop
> out completely for a while.. sometimes there is lag which would make a
> gamer gnaw their own arm off.

Certainly different modems behave differently.  I had better luck
getting a connection on bad days (when the A/C's were running) with a
speedstream 5260, while a Sangoma S518 maintained the line better if it
could get a link at all.  The sangoma also had the option to specify a
max speed to link at so I could lock it at 512kbps for example and it
had a better chance of connecting and keeping the connection, but
sometimes it just couldn't connect at all while the speedstream could
(although it might drop the link 2 minutes later).

Lennart Sorensen
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