Phone line static influencing DSL quality

[Mike Kallies]

On Tue, August 9, 2005 11:34 am, Sy said:
> I may as well bring this up.  Has anyone else experienced severe line
> noise influencing a DSL connection?
...
> 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.


I have a GVC modem and I can telnet into the modem in order to check the
connection speed and the performance characteristics:

BB0040> adsl show rate
Operation Mode : G.DMT
Data Path : Fast
  Downstream Bit Rate : 1184 Kbps
  Upstream   Bit Rate : 160 Kbps
BB0040> adsl show perf
Downstream :
  Capacity Occupation : 86 %
  Noise Margin  : 7.5 dB
  Attenuation   : 60.5 dB
  Output Power  : 16 dBm
Upstream :
  Capacity Occupation : 42 %
  Noise Margin  : 18 dB
  Attenuation   : 31.5 dB
  Output Power  : 12 dBm
BB0040>


In relative terms, my connection *SUCKS*

Apparently when DSL is enabled on a line, Bell Nexxia leaves the line at
the maximum rates.  When my line was set to this, the connection was
unreliable.  Sometimes the modem would restart itself, sometimes the
connection would just drop unexpectedly.  I think the key factor was that
the modem simply did not handle the "dirty" DSL line very well.

I had the DSL provider open a ticket with Bell to drop the rate on the
modem and now the Capacity Occupation is as it is shown above, and I get
much better connect times... e.g. it might drop once every two or three
days rather than once every 10 or 15 minutes.

My connection is definately slower, but hey, it's more reliable and that
matters a lot more to me.

I'm not a DSL expert, just my experience.

-Mike

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml