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Hi! I'm hoping someone can offer me some advice about this. I've been having problems with my BT Infinity connection for around 3 months now. It was solid for at least a year prior to these problems, but now it disconnects intermittently. The disconnections cause the line to be banded by BT meaning there are times where my connection (which had a previous minimum of 6Mbps) will be banded at around 1.5Mbps. Last night it wouldn't stay connected for more than 5 minutes at a time, and every time it connected again, the downstream linkrate was something different..Usually between 2 and 5.6. The upstream varies between 0.4 and 1.1.
I've had 4 engineers out and none of them have found a 'fault' but they refer to 'errors'. The last one told me because we were so far from the Fibre cabinet (we live in the countryside and the signal travels over copper for about 1.5 miles) that the line was unstable. But I don't understand how that can be the case when the line has been stable and providing a minimum connection rate of 6Mbps for over a year? Another wrinkle is that my brother (who lives in the house behind mine - further from the cabinet) was having problems up until the end of October (slow connection - exactly what ours is now) which is when our problems started. He has a solid 6.7 connection with no drops now and he had to complain and complain until something was done. He also is supplied by the same pole we are, except his goes to another pole, then into the ground. There's at least 50 meters distance between our houses. And yet we keep getting told that between 2 and 4 is the best we can expect. I know we're being fobbed off but I don't know enough about it to challenge what the engineer is telling me, even though I know it's not accurate.
I'd really appreciate any advice. This is so frustrating
If you are that far away from the headend/fiber cabinet, it is very possible the last technician has a point about your line quality. When your modem disconnects because of noise on the line, it will reconnect at a lower rate, increasing the margin between signal and noise. It is likely that there is too much noise on the line at times (it varies), and that's when you have your connection problems.
I would try to login to the DSL modem and look at the signal level, noise margin and try to figure out what type of speed you can get based on those. There are some FAQs on the main site that may help you see what you can expect, and what is considered good (depending on your signal level):
Ultimately, if there is too much variation in the SNR/Attenuation, you may have to keep bothering BT to clean up the line to where it is usable. It is possible that they switched your line with your brothers' too
