Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

looks like a 5 minute disconnect because the shub was constantly rebooting and couldn't establish a connection.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

What is a sub? I am assuming the VM Hub - the actual modem - right?

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

Superhub (shub). VM probably should have left out the super part of the description in all truth :D

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

Looks identical to what I was experiencing a few weeks ago. When the engineer comes, insist he does a line test back to the cabinet in the street. My first engineer visit was just to replace the hub, which 'fixed' the problem for all of a day until it all went downhill again.

Second engineer did a proper test and found a damaged cable underground. Luckily it was easy enough to replace and it's sorted me out apart from a few random errors.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

They said they passed the dropout information to the engineer so hopefully they'll test the line itself?

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I thought you was joking. I am amazed you haven't picked up on it before. Many of us have been using that expression since 2009 ish when shub 1 was around. I hate contradictions and I have never been able to, in good conscience, call it a "super"hub. We actually called it the pooperhub to start off with but one of the admins told us off for it so we came up with shub instead. It is an absolute joke given the plethora of problems and bugs there have been with each model plus the fact that pretty much any consumer bought router has more features and out performs the shub. Doesn't make it that super does it? Btw, is there a reason why they haven't fixed the decimal point in the upstream power levels yet? :rolleyes:

He'll test the connection in the street cabinet to see what it is reading and make sure it isn't a network fault and if that is ok he'll test the connection from the cabinet to your house to see if the cable is ok and then have a look at the connectors, splitters and isolators within the premises. There is a checklist of stuff he has got to do to make sure everything is mint and he'll get you to sign it before he goes.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I was seeing graphs like this when the downstream power levels had drifted out of band (between -3 and -8 db in my case).

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2020/06/4.png

I took out the 6db FPA which brought them back into band:

https://www.cableforum.uk/images/local/2020/06/5.png

If you have no FPA, I think the Engineer is required to do something at the patch panel in the (black) street cabinet to up the power levels. Might be wrong though ..

It will be interesting to see what he (or she) says ..

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I really need to better understand what these things all mean. What is a power level in this context? What is an RS error?

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

The power level is the signal strength from the cable into the hub. It should be between -6 and +10 when it is installed. (This does include some margin for signals varying over time, so your signals might drift outside this range but not actually cause a problem).

RS is Reed-Solomon forward error correction. Some extra check bits are appended to each data packet that's transmitted so that if the packet is slightly corrupted by noise on the network, the errors can be corrected (that's known as a correctable error). If the corruption is more severe, it won't be possible to correct the errors, but the receiver will still know that the data was incorrect, so it can discard the packet entirely (an uncorrectable error).

When an uncorrectable error happens on broadband, the high-level protocols generally detect that a packet has been lost, and requests its retranmission, but this takes time so slows down your data transfer. If an uncorrectable error happens on broadcast TV, there is no way to request retransmission, so parts of the picture are simply missed - usually it pixellates.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I too thought you joking not knowing what the term shub meant with you being on this site all these years but I am sitting here shaking my head at your other questions.... Lol

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

In your downstream table you have got pre-rs errors and post-rs errors. The pre errors are the bits of dats that arrive to you corrupted before they have had a chance to be fixed. The post errors are the one that have tried and cannot be fixed and these are the ones you need to worry about because it is lost data. Traditionally when there is problem with a particular channel you'll see 0 post rs errors down the list and then a few hundred or thousand on one channel but you have got a ridiculous amount across the board which just doesn't happen unless there was a major problem higher up the network and if that was the case VM would have picked up on it by now. That is why I believe the problem is more your end.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I don't know all that either.My and Damien's skills lie elsewhere..;)

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

Cheers!

Let's see what the engineer says. Hopefully, they'll be alarmed by the RS and power levels and track it down. My fear is they'll go 'internet's working tho' and leave it.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

I hope so because you have got 68,000 posts between you so you have been up to something :D

fret not, the peeps on the phone might be ming mongs but the techs know what they are doing. Intermittent faults are annoying and hard to diagnose but you have done the work for him. Show him your graph, power levels and rs errors and he'll know what is going on.

Re: Occasional Dropouts
 

Update!

The engineer said the wiring was one of the worst he has ever seen. The worst he has seen and for the internet to still be working anyway. The cable was damaged, the box outside had splitters going off in different directions hurting the power, the cable has been wired up to bend right away and had gone. He basically was confused about how it was working

Replaced everything including the shub.

I still have Post RS errors but in the low thousands. I.E 6648. Is that normal?