Several drop outs
 

Over the past 2-3 days have had an excessive number of drop outs.
In the Hitron log I see: B-INIT-RNG Failure - Retries exceeded

Power levels look fine all
SNR has always been variable in the area but looking OK.

Any ideas what that log message means?

Port Frequency (Hz) Modulation Power (dBmV) SNR (dB) Channel
1 243000000 256QAM 1.000 37.636 14
2 139000000 256QAM 1.600 38.605 1
3 147000000 256QAM 1.700 38.605 2
4 155000000 256QAM 1.900 38.605 3
5 163000000 256QAM 1.700 38.983 4
6 171000000 256QAM 1.800 38.983 5
7 179000000 256QAM 1.800 38.605 6
8 187000000 256QAM 1.900 38.605 7
9 195000000 256QAM 1.800 38.605 8
10 203000000 256QAM 1.900 38.983 9
11 211000000 256QAM 1.900 37.356 10
12 219000000 256QAM 1.900 37.636 11
13 227000000 256QAM 1.600 37.636 12
14 235000000 256QAM 1.300 37.636 13
15 251000000 256QAM 0.700 37.636 15
16 259000000 256QAM 0.900 37.636 16
17 267000000 256QAM 1.300 37.636 17
18 275000000 256QAM 1.700 38.605 18
19 283000000 256QAM 2.100 38.983 19
20 291000000 256QAM 2.300 38.605 20
21 299000000 256QAM 2.700 38.605 21
22 307000000 256QAM 2.800 38.605 22
23 315000000 256QAM 2.700 38.983 23
24 323000000 256QAM 2.600 38.605 24

Upstream Overview
Port Frequency (Hz) BandWidth Modulation Power (dBmV) Channel
1 46200000 6400000 ATDMA 42.000 3
2 39400000 6400000 ATDMA 42.000 4
3 53700068 6400000 ATDMA 43.500 2
4 60300024 6400000 ATDMA 43.500 1

Re: Several drop outs
 

I do believe it can't contact the cmts. It sends off an initial ranging request to register itself with the cmts and begin the connection process and the cmts will reply with an initial ranging response. The response or acknowledgement has to be received within a fixed time window and it there is no reply it times out and the modem starts again. It will do a certain amount of retries and then give up which is what happened here. There are numerous reasons why the cmts won't respond within the set time window and in this instance I think it is just a case of being overwhelmed by too many modem hammering it at the same time if everyone was disconnected and trying to come back online all at the same time.

Re: Several drop outs
 

That makes sense- there was a full outage - loss of sync etc, and then I guess, as you say, too many devices tried to register all at the same time. What makes me wonder about this - there was a planned outage last week. Business customers get notified of those in advance.

Then on Saturday a full outage for several hours - area fault that was posted on the status page, and since then various drops.

Re: Several drop outs
 

is there still an open fault reference on the VM website for it? I am wondering if they half fixed it while they wait for a part and there is now an intermittent fault which will be remedied or if they think they properly fixed and they haven't. If there aren't any "known issues" I would ring them up and try and get someone out. Even if they won't acknowledge an area fault you can get an engineer out, show him your graph and the frequent drop outs and then he can escalate it from there.

Re: Several drop outs
 

on the status page my area shows all green now for broadband, so they claim to have fixed the issue. Seems more stable today. Good shout though about keepign graphs for them if it gets unstable again.

I suspected SNR as often been an issue here and can drop to 31 or lower. but recently that seems to have crept up to 38 on many channels