FAO: Telephony Adept People - Downgrading a Line

gord · 6 Jul 2006 at 17:50

Righto, today i had an engineer out to the house for line testing etc. He experienced the drop in connection while here which was good to see from my point.

Upon testing, he did not seem troubled by the SNR but more by the attenuation which failed the 2meg speed test im on as my attenuation flexes from 41 to 49 which i believe is above and below the limit for 2meg.

So, i phoned AOL and told them to downgrade me to 1meg. Upon doing so ive had a second thought, that they will just limit my usage to 1meg and leave my line as it is. As it stands, i do still connect at 2.2meg and my modem is synced at 2meg speeds. Will they actually change my line speed down or do i need to phone again and explain the circumstances? Because now, im on 1meg and experience the disconnections from my 2meg connection... which is even more frustrating.

+ The engineer said i may try disconnecting the extensions in the house. He did this before but we could not test to see if the connection lasted but the SNR was up to 20 when he did so. However, looking inside the phone socket thinger.. theres some coloured wires to number pins which as far as im aware are the extensions to the other sockets etc... should i be messing around with these? I dont want to break anything.

Burbleflop · 6 Jul 2006 at 19:09

With a healthy enough SNR, 49dB attenuation isn't a problem for 2Mbit - my attenuation was 51-52dB and my 2Mbit was rock solid.

When you speak to AOL, tell them that you don't want traffic shaping to limit your line to 1Mbit, you actually want your sync rate changed. Dunno if they'll understand that though

Phil99 · 6 Jul 2006 at 19:13

What was the SNR before you d/c the extensions? 20dB SNR is perfectly healthy for a 2Mbps line...if it's a stable SNR that is, I had a perfectly stable 2Meg line with an attenuation of ~55dB as reported by my router and can't remember ever having a sync drop.

gord · 6 Jul 2006 at 19:16

My average SNR is about 12 during the day, dropping to about 6-9 at night.

The current plan is, as i have squeezed AOL out of their Free router deal, is to wait for that and see if it handles my connection better than my 105 modem. As i understand it, different routers/modems etc handle fluctuations differently.. so if thats stable with my 2meg sync rate i will just ask them to up the throttling back to 2meg.

Burbleflop · 6 Jul 2006 at 20:01

Throttling a 2Mbit line down to 1Mbit isn't going to make any difference to the sync dropping.

gord · 6 Jul 2006 at 20:44

Burbleflop said:
Throttling a 2Mbit line down to 1Mbit isn't going to make any difference to the sync dropping.

Exactly.. thats why i need my line properly downgrading, at the moment they are limiting a two meg unstable line to one meg, which means i get 1meg speeds with the instability of my 2meg connection.. which goes back to my first post as to what they will do.