Intermittent disconnections

[krentz]

Hi all,

I hope someone will be able to help me with this. I firstly have to say that I am, overall, impressed with the connection, and despite the issues, it's probably the best overall that I've had while living at this address (particularly given that our local BT cabinet has been indefinitely passed over for FTTC).

However the one thing that's preventing me from giving it a perfect rating is the intermittent connectivity issues I appear to be having. I was reluctant to report it given that it is intermittent and difficult to replicate, however on the days that it occurs it can be quite frustrating especially if I'm trying to e.g. play an online game.

My current setup is a Hub 3 in Modem-only mode using an Asus RT-AX82U as a router. What often happens is that I get a "No Unicast maintenance opportunities received: T4 Timeout" error message in the logs (or sometimes a B-INIT-RNG failure) and at this time the connection drops out, the light on the Hub goes to green and it goes into ranging, before reconnecting. This can happen once a day or, often enough, multiple times in the same day.

However it will then be completely fine and more or less rock solid for days or even weeks afterwards, before causing problems again. The day of the week seems random. more often than not it's a Sunday, but it's happened today (Thursday) too for example.

I'll have to continue this message as apparently there's a 20k character limit, but I will give my stats in the next post.

[krentz]

Hey, thanks for getting back to me. I've checked and yes, the power levels are still roughly the same (+/- 0.1-0.3dBmV) both for the upstream and downstream.

I've noticed whenever the connection drops, when it re-establishes connection the pre- and post-RS errors are wiped and in some cases the channels are on a different frequency, perhaps because it has to renegotiate the connection, but the power levels of each channel are roughly within the same parameters. FWIW the error counts are generally quite small and usually only pre-RS.

There are no area-level faults recorded against my account on the online service status checker, nor on the automated service status number (whether I check for known faults or run a check myself directly).

I've used the online checker a few times before, it will record that there is a fault while my connection drops and potentially prompt us to book an engineer appointment, but while it's running it claims there are no issues. I believe there was an area-level outage in the past that was recorded there once that lasted for a few hours, but for the most part it comes back in the green.

Reckon I'm better off trying to book an appointment or should I wait until I'm outside the fault window to reduce the risk of cancellation or miscommunication?

[jbrennand]

Try it... but they are usually auto cancelled if the issue is still live. You could find you can book it for a few days hence and then the issue is resolved so it does go ahead and you have saved some time.

[krentz]

I just thought I would post an update, as I all too often run across posts online that describe issues similar to what I'm having only for the OP to vanish into obscurity never to be heard from again.

Since the last time I posted on the topic, not only have I had almost no disconnections but I have had almost no downtime as well, which mirrors the experience I had in the first couple of months after signing up. I elected not to pursue the issue with the power levels as whatever VM have addressed on their end seems to have been sufficient to resolve the problem, at least for now (touch wood)!

So many thanks to everyone for their helpful suggestions.

[Martin_N]

We're glad to hear this all seems to be working okay now krentz. 

Please do reach out if you need any future assistance.

^Martin