Cable Forum - Random problems

[EDIT : Post attempt 2. First post timed out with blank page.]

...Long time reader, first time poster!

I've been with Virgin since 2001 (so I remember Blueyonder, when they were great, and Telewest, which was a bit meh, and now Virgin which is gaustly). In all that time, I've had the same modem - Motorola SB4100.

We ditched the VM phone line a year ago and got a BT line put in, in the hope of going ADSL with someone (obviously, not with BT though!) - and then found out that the phone line runs 5km in the opposite direction to the exchange (about 1km away). Argh!

So...we put up with STM, and Phorm, the "support" in India, etc. But recently the service has dropped to virtually unusuable levels. Possibly - but not sure - coinciding with being upgraded to 10meg a few months ago.

Random packet loss, web pages refuseing to load, then loading partially (e.g. no pictures)... then miraculously everything is fine for a few minutes, or an hour...then its gone again, can't do anything. Even www.virginmedia.com doesn't load properly to see the (useless) service status page.

Tried different computers. Tried bypassing our router and going direct. Rebooted and replugged everything. Different times of day and night, no pattern to it.

Running PingPlotter on a 1 second refresh shows occasional packet loss at random intervals and random steps.

My question really for the experts here - is could the increased speed be a problem, as the quality of the physical cable is a bit suspect? The old VM phone line was incredibly noisy at times due to poor quality cable and water under the street. However, that's physically a totally different cable running back to the street box.

In 2001 we had the cable TV disconnected because couldn't have both TV and CM working together at the same time - but if I went outside and physically disconnected either of the wires it would work. We were told at the time that they would have to dig up the entire street to relay the cable, which would take 3 months to even consider... so we told them to forget the TV - and got Sky in the next day (literally!)

I had to pull out of a raid on WoW tonight becuase I had no less than 23 disconnects in 40 minutes - although Virgin<->Telia is probably in part to blame for this - but it took 4 attempts to post my apology on a UK-based forum, so its not just Telia at fault!

Was on the phone to a very friendly advisor this morning for 20 minutes, nothing is showing up as faulty and there's nothing in my area - which has not been 50meg activated, either.

Code:

Downstream         Value

Frequency         331000000 Hz Locked

Signal to Noise Ratio         38 dB

Power Level         8 dBmV



Upstream         Value

Channel ID         2

Frequency         22200000 Hz Ranged

Power Level         38 dBmV

Help! Any ideas? Or just keep ringing support until they do something about my line - although they are saying there's nothing wrong with it (really? so why I can't I even load your own website...).

---------- Post added at 22:07 ---------- Previous post was at 21:10 ----------

I've got various pictures from PingPlotter I've taken this evening... but I can't upload them. Both Imageshack and a paid-for FTP in Telehouse are failing to get more than 20% into a 116k document. At the same time as this fails, I can (erratically) browse and fairly steadily ping. Spent an hour trying to get them up. No luck at all.

If I go to Speedtest.net it says 39ms and 9.83 meg - and then fails on the upload.