Facing another engineer call on Sat, advice please...

[Apollo]

Hi Gang,

Location: Manchester, Worsley
Connection: 10mb (sort of)

Like many others I read on these forums I too am faced with 12.6kb/sec download speeds between 5pm and 12am more or less all week long. I have a £34.99 10mb connection (up to of course) but for the last few weeks the slow-downs are getting more regular.

After some 20 or so calls over this period I got one of our friends in India to do a test on my line which he claims was seriously affected by packet loss. I now have another engineer booked for Saturday.

Thing is, this is now my 3rd engineer call and they roll in around 2-4pm when the connection is fine and tell me "it's fine" - I try and tell them it wont be fine in a couple of hours but they pay no attention. I wondered if anyone could help me by giving me some indication as to how I can negotiate/deal with the next engineer to actually do something? After 10 years with C&W/NTL I feel I will have to move provider and I want to avoid this if possible, but I feel I am in a dead-end as these guys can never "see" the poor bandwidth and freezing digital TV I get all evening.

Anybody got any tips or advice as to what I can tell him to check? or ask him whether he checked?

M

[Nedkelly]

Hi there is not alot a tech can do for speed issues all we can do is check the levels at the modem and check the reverse path .By doing 192.168.100.1 and check the upstream .Do a trace route to a uk website if the ubr is at max you will see lag on the first hop which is the ubr .See thread Licoln Prob as they are having touble whith high packet loss and slow speeds.There is not a great deal we can do but for some fault reps its the easy way to get you off the phone by booking a tech (Only some reps do this )I use ping plotter its free for 30 days i leave the pc on running this its quit a staight forward program to run and show you packet loss

[JontyG]

can you not get a call when the problem is occuring?
You have a call for Sat but by your description everything is likely to be working fine then - and with the best will in the world its not easy to pinpoint a fault while its not happening.
You will usually be ofered the next available appointment. AFAIK most areas have a "late" or evening appointment time, but as this is a popular time its often booked out days in advance.
If the tech experiences the problem you are far more likely to get it resolved.

[Apollo]

As I feared then, looks like I may be stuffed

I have to pray that my bad connection rears it's head tomorrow afternoon I guess

The ping plotter will help me in what way? As evidence to them? And which target address should I ping and plot against?

Thanks for your help.

[Ben Taylor]

Like Ned says, there's not really a lot the NTL engineer can do. The one that came round to my house said that NTL had no plans to do anything about the congestion in the area...

What a dismal response if i'm honest. This problem has been going on for ages now, with constant issues every single evening.

[Apollo]

Doesn't sound good does it

In any case I have downloaded PingPlotter (http://www.pingplotter.com/) a free visual trace route over time and have pointed it at www.bbc.co.uk for the next 24 hours. At least then I have some solid data to show NTL/Engineers where the problem lays.

If anyone is interested I will post the results here, and let you know the outcome of the call.

A special thanks to those that replied, speaking (or trying) to NTL can be extremely frustrating and the customer experience is extremely poor. In some small way it does help one feel better to at least talk on these forums so keep at it

[Tate53]

Its weird that you are having these problems so close to me. I live in Walkden which as you know is just down the road from you and never have any slow down problems that i can notice on my 10mb line. THe main times I go on like you are between 6pm-12pm.

I must just be a lucky one with not many people on my UBR. Sorry to hear about your problem, hope you get it sorted, let me know how it turns out.

[Nedkelly]

With speed issues as i have said there is not much us techs can do .We know there speed issus in aeras but they still send techs out to do what .Is a question i have put to a certain manager about the state of the ubrs

[Gareth]

So is there anything that can be done to escalate things once an engineer has been out and determined that there's nothing he/she can do? You'd hope that if neither 1st line support nor an on-site engineer can resolve a problem, then someone more senior would step-in to investigate what's causing a breakdown.

Is it gonna take people threatening legal action before NTL's senior management admit there's something amiss?

Maybe those of us who are affected should club together to form a group of narked off NTL user, and kick up a fuss, contact Watchdog and create yet more bad publicity for the company, etc... Strength in numbers, etc...

Maybe then they'd listen and react accordingly.

[Apollo]

Hey Gang,

Location: Worsley, Manchester
Modem: 250
Connection: 10mb - up to(TM) ;-)

Here I am with an update of the call and some information from the ping pattern I put together over the last 24 Hours.

Firstly the ping pattern:

i ran a trace to www.bbc.co.uk for 24 hours or so and the routing i got was:

1. WGT634U,192.168.1.1
2. -------------- ,10.236.124.1
3. oldh-t2cam1-b-ge-wan44-130.inet.ntl.com,80.5.165.193
4. manc-t3core-1b-ge-112-0.inet.ntl.com,195.182.175.101
5. man-bb-b-so-020-0.inet.ntl.com,213.105.242.245
6. man-bb-a-ge-000-0.inet.ntl.com,62.253.187.177
7. lee-bb-b-so-100-0.inet.ntl.com,62.253.185.194
8. nth-bb-a-so-600-0.inet.ntl.com,213.105.175.133
9. gfd-bb-b-so-010-0.inet.ntl.com,62.253.185.98
10. tele-ic-1-so-110-0.inet.ntl.com,62.253.185.78
11. -------------- ,212.58.238.189
12. -------------- ,212.58.238.133
13. -------------- ,212.58.238.141
14. -------------- ,212.58.226.232


Sure enough between 5.30pm and 11pm last night my packet loss exceeded 60% on step 3,
oldh-t2cam1-b-ge-wan44-130.inet.ntl.com. I have looked this up as being the Oldham server centre in Manchester for NTL. Interestingly this is the centre that handles all the "Video on Demand" (engineer also confirmed this) and it was when this new on demand service was introduced a few weeks ago my connection began to degrade. Forgive me for putting 2 and 2 together here but...

So, onto the engineer. Nice lad appeared helpful and all, I began to realise by this point there was little he could do to help me in reality. But he did indicate that a large percentage of his calls lately were due to packet loss and speed issues. Something "head office" is well aware of apparently.

Anyhow, I kept readings from my Cable Modem for the last day or so here is a typical one:

Down

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 1
Downstream Frequency : 586750000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM64
Downstream Symbol Rate : 6952 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps12Increment17
Downstream Receive Power Level : 0.8 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 33.6 dB

Up

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 4
Upstream Frequency : 46400000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QPSK
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 47.0 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

Upon inspection of this, the Engineer indicated the levels were very high and then fitted an attenuator to the cable, my new readings are:

Down

Downstream Lock : Locked
Downstream Channel Id : 1
Downstream Frequency : 586750000 Hz
Downstream Modulation : QAM64
Downstream Symbol Rate : 6952 Ksym/sec
Downstream Interleave Depth : taps12Increment17
Downstream Receive Power Level : -10.1 dBmV
Downstream SNR : 33.0 dB

Up

Upstream Lock : Locked
Upstream Channel ID : 4
Upstream Frequency : 46400000 Hz
Upstream Modulation : QPSK
Upstream Symbol Rate : 2560 Ksym/sec
Upstream transmit Power Level : 50.5 dBmV
Upstream Mini-Slot Size : 2

It is hard to tell at the moment whether this has improved anything I will report back on that, but in the short term these are my findings and the changes he made.

[SnoopZ]

I'm not that clued up on Levels but i think your levels are now worse.

Downstream Receive Power Level : -10.1 dBmV

Upstream transmit Power Level : 50.5 dBmV

[mmm]

Originally Posted by SnoopZ

I'm not that clued up on Levels but i think your levels are now worse.

Me too! I notice you are still on QAM64, NTL will upgrade this to QAM256 at some point which will increase the local network capacity. I understand the signal is boosted when QAM256 introduced, and target downstream increases from 0dB to +3dB. IMHO -10dB is too low for an engineer to have left it, the docsis spec is +/- 15 dB so should work but signals levels go up and down due to the weather etc.

[Apollo]

Understood

So- I removed the -10 dBmV attenuator he put on, leave me with a signal of around 0.3 dBmV, he also left 6dB attenuator with me, is it worth putting that on? or just leave as is? His reason in the first place for putting one on was "the amount of noise at that loud level will cause issues".


Thanks for all the input and patience.

[jaycee]

What on earth.... 0dBmV is the perfect level for downstream, 0.3dBmV is great! Why on earth did he think it needed an attenuator....

[Apollo]

Heh,

Well I put everything back as it was and there is no change to my terrible connection. I guess I just got to live with it in the vain hope that one day the UMB gets upgraded I am 3km from the BT exchange in Swinton so best I could do with ADSL is 512kb, so no choices here.

To end on a lighter note, the Engineer almost screwing my system reminded me of an old joke:

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold, the bird froze and fell to the ground in a large field.

While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on it. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, it began to realize how warm it was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate.

Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung and promptly dug him out and ate him!

Lessons:
1) Not everyone who drops crap on you is your enemy.
2) Not everyone who gets you out of crap is your friend.
3) And when you're in deep crap, keep your mouth shut.



Thanks everyone who helped out and gave input.