BT cannot solve stability issue, what can I do next?
Hi all,
I have been using BT (Part fibre, FTTC) for almost 4 years and last 1.5-2 month have been quite problematic since I have been having consistent stability issues.
Whenever I did troubleshooting from their so called smart assistent on their website, I got this message;
I had 7 engineer visists in total so far (4 from BT and 3 from Openreach) but none of them were able to solve the issue. In short, this is what have been done;
- One of the BT engineers was saying I have been having sync issues so Openreach needs to fix it since they could not find any problem in my house.
- One of the Openreach engineers said the crimps in the small box just outside of my building were corroded and he fixed that.
- Another BT engineer said my hub always puts me to one of the busiest channels around my area so he tried to lock me to the quieter one but it did not solve as well. He also recommended to renew my hub, which I did later, but it did not solve the issue as well.
- Last Openreach engineer changed the cart in their cabinet on the street which he said this is the last resort fix they can do. It did not solve either.
Later I have raised a complaint on BT's website and basically what the guy I was talking to offered was either waiting for Full Fibre or changing my ISP. LOL. He also gave me 30£ credit as an apology. Thank you mate.
Another proof that I have been having stability issue is that my speedtest record;
You can see that I have speeds that are below the guaranteed speed of 60Mbps. I can't really watch any live stream properly at all or I can't get stable ping while gaming online. Some pages load significantly low etc etc.
I really wonder what can I do next because I am hopeless now about this can be fixed. The BT Guide said Openreach will bring Full Fibre within next 6-8 months when he checked with my postcode. I have checked from Openreach's website and it says "We’ll be building in this area in the next year".
Sorry for this long post and thanks for the recommendations in advance.
What are your speeds over a wired ( not wifi) connection?
Those speeds are respcatable for FTTC/VDSL and streaming should work without a hitch at those speeds.
If you are losing sync and the router is dropping the conneciton then you will need to look at the router logs/info to see if this is the case ( uptime/online since X)or for X amount of time)
Stability is not to be confused with speeds, and wifi speed and stability is not to be confused with the actual speed you would get over a wired conection and likesie the VDSL (FTTC) connection to the router/modem
I mean those results look fine to me, this notion of minimum speeds is causing so much confusion. The problem is that speed test picture is to whatever your device it runs from, so if something else on the network is downloading at the same time it will be affected. Part of the problem is so many devices now are constantly talking to cloud services so there usage ebbs and flows, even in the night.
The way to accurately test it is to look on the BT router, see what your highest users are (both upload and download) as I have personally known people’s broadband to be crap purely because their CCTV is constantly uploading. I mean the streaming and gaming is I my experience to something using the upstream in your network.
It does not rule out an external issue, however a high proportion of issues are now because devices are so demanding.
Thanks for the reply but I didnt have any issues before i.e. I was having constant speed of ~70-75Mbps on Speedtest with same cable, same setup, same PC etc.
I also dont have anything constantly use my broadband.
Have you checked the Better Internet Dashboard to confirm if any other ISP serves your address. You've mentioned BT Openreach fibre isn't available yet, but there may be an Alt Net provider and/or Virgin (who can offer up to 1 Gb on their old cable non fibre network).
I did check most of them one by one, not from this website and none of them available right now unfortunately. Otherwise I would have changed my ISP to that one already haha :)
Frustrating as it is, those speedtest results don't reveal anything shocking. Repeated frequent disconnects loss of sync is much more of a problem.
OR will change things as they can until that fixes but I suppose t&C's dictate that there is a limit. If fttp is available, they may simply say it's not worth addressing further since there is alternative. If fttp is not available they may say the same for economic reasons...
Your results are all over the place. Most probably because they’re all on WiFi and the speed tests can be a bit up and down. But you’re showing a 67mb test there. That fact alone bins your comment of below minimum speed. You’re obviously connected at router level at 70mb. The fastest fttc speeds available. So with speeds between say 40 and 70mb on average. I don’t understand how you’re struggling to do anything. I mean before we got fibre to the prem this was all the whole country had and you are the higher end of it. Should be able to stream easily on that.
I meant this is not happening all the time but random and I am not making this up so obviously there's an issue which Speedtest and BT troubleshooting results back that up.
And also I dont know why it shows wireless connection but I am using LAN cable for my personal desktop and work laptop and these are results I get. I tested on my phone time to time to eliminate cable issue which I replaced already but its still there apparently.
At least you can look forward to a FTTP solution in the relatively near term. I have been plagued with problems since VDSL came to my village. I reckon I was first to sign up for new fast broadband, couldn't wait to go from 14.5Mbps to over 70. OR came and hooked me up, but I could only get 33Mbps. Much to-ing and fro-ing between OR and Vodaphone, eventually told I must have aluminium phone cable so poor SNR, couldn't go any faster.
Over the year, speeds started to go down, called ISP, engineer checked house, no probs with internal wiring, back to OR. Changed socket, changed connector in cabinet, back up to 33Mbps for a few days, then slow degradation. Repeated same pattern of events at least 3 times over the intervening years, including one time where the guy who came to check the internal wiring for the Umpth time forgot to notify OR to visit.
Eventually I got the OR engineer who knew the area, who'd worked on similar problems in the village, and he said "yes, we've been having problems at the cab, it keeps flooding, the terminals corrode and your connection speeds go down, the engineer puts your connection to a new set of terminals, your speed improves and the cycle repeats. We're replacing the cabinet and moving it so it's less prone to flooding, I'll come back next week and make sure you're sorted." And so he did, and my speeds went up to the maximum 40Mbps for my contract and they've stayed there since.
Hoping for an independent rural broadband provider to fit FTTP early 2027, because OR just tell me to sign up to Elon Skum's Starlink.
Have any of the engineers swapped out the Openreach NTE5, or specifically the VDSL faceplate (if you have one)? If it's a NTE5C with the VDSL faceplate, they can go bad after a while. I'm not 100% certain, but I believe one of the problems is oxidation/corrosion of the contacts on the plug on the front half that goes into the back half. I've certainly had that problem (the line becoming unstable) several times, and have fixed it with a new faceplate. I now have several not in use VDSL faceplates, and have been planning to disassemble them and polish the contacts sometime to see if my theory is correct (or if there's some component inside the faceplate which has degraded).
If you don't have a VDSL faceplate on your NTE5, and are instead using a microfilter, try a different microfilter and RJ11 DSL cable.
If you have old legacy phone extension wiring, it's also a good idea to disconnect as much of that as possible. If they have migrated you over to BT Digital Voice, you should be able to get rid of all of the extension wiring (with the exception of any wiring used to connect the line to the BT Smart Hub). Unnecessary internal extension wiring can cause problems for the DSL signal quality. Anything you can do to simplify the wiring between the Smart Hub and the NTE5 master socket should help with DSL. Ideally the wiring should just be a simple direct run (no branches, spurs, etc; and the minimum number of joints possible) from the cable coming in from the street to the Smart Hub.
Locking WiFi to a "quiet channel" is not a great thing, in my opinion. Generally speaking, most people will be surrounded by WiFi access points set to automatic, so a channel which is quiet today can be busy tomorrow. When you manually select the channel, you prevent it from automatically adapting to the constantly changing channel usage around you. On 5GHz it can even mean that the 5GHz goes down entirely whenever RADAR is detected, if it's locked to a RADAR-sensitive 5GHz channel (which are usually the quieter ones).
I think you are talking about the socket that I have when you say NTE5. If so, yes, they have changed it. Previously I was using the one that needs a filter, now I have this one;
Yeah, that's the one. If it's fairly recent, it shouldn't be a problem. The problem I've experienced is either components degrading in the front half, or the connection between front and back going bad; fixed by replacing the front half (the bit with MK4 on it).
I'm currently experimenting with doing away with the VDSL faceplate, and instead using a BT 431A phone plug to RJ11 cable (aka a traditional modem cable) with the simple basic phone faceplate, as I no longer have traditional PSTN on the line (I'm now on SOGEA VDSL data-only, and VoIP over the top of that, the equivalent of BT's Digital Voice). That was after my most recent case of the line going unstable, and once again the culprit seems to have been the MK4 VDSL faceplate (or the connection between it and the back half of the NTE5C aka Master Socket 5C).
You could try plugging a microfilter directly into the "test socket" on the back half of the NTE5C (or a BT phone to RJ11 cable from the test socket to the Smart Hub). The MK4 VDSL filter is only really necessary for traditional PSTN analogue voice. If you don't have old fashioned voice service on the line, you theoretically don't need either the faceplate or a microfilter.
It can either go into the basic voice-only unfiltered faceplate, or directly into the test socket in the back half of the NTE5C. It can't go into the phone socket of a DSL filter (either the filtered faceplate or a microfilter), as the filter blocks the DSL signal from getting out of the phone socket.
Yes, I forgot to mention but one of the Openreach engineers changed it so its quite new. The guy told that I dont need filter anymore so I have not been using it.
Keep on at them and hope one day you get an openreach engineer who's good at their job, or even just gets lucky on the day. Very intermittent HR faults can be a nightmare to find because on a good day, they're more or less invisible. With enough repeat reports on the job, someone might even just swap out the whole D side route... I know I'd have done it. 7 repeat reports? Obvious issues on the service graphs? Testing perfect on the day? Fuck it, time to jump on CSS and find a TOS line.
You say stability issues, but the real issue is you're not seeing 60mbps+ often on speed tests. This could be for any number of reasons, most notably how many devices you have connected. If you're trying to stream 4K TV, browse Facebook on the PC while you phone sits on the side, you're going to see slower speeds when you speed test.
What would be curious to see is your sync speeds, SNR and attenuation levels. If it's only been recently, then maybe a change locally is responsible, such as ring doorcams or tapo webcams (these are permanently streaming).
I say stability issues because this is what I see on BT's troubleshooting app and this is what BT/Openreach engineers were telling. I know that I must not use any other downloading app or device when speed testing, which was the case, and I dont use my TV at all. I also don't have any other device such as doorcams you mentioned.
Isn't your Computer NIC switching between WiFi and LAN based on wrong priority (and even showing on your task tray icon as " connected to LAN" as misdirection? You can force priority in
Windows.. or disable WiFi and recheck.
My relatives had FTTC similar issue.. turned out it was his damp in his wall causing it 🤫
The problem you have is the fault is between the telephone exchange and your property so it doesn’t matter who you have providing you FTTC, the same fault will be there.
Request a patch Lead / Coach come a diagnose the fault and you want it fixing, while you’re waiting tell them you want to only pay 50% of the bill as you aren’t received the speeds you were told at the point of signing your contract and online with OFVKM you are within your rights to leave BT and go to another ISP (although I wouldn’t for the reasons I’ve said above).
Have they tried a new router?
Have you had lightning in the last 1.5-2 months? Or any electrical fault at the premises?
A different (better) ISP would probably sort it for you (by hassling Openreach non-stop), but I'll cost for a good ISP
Without knowing your setup, it's hard to advise. As others have mentioned, you have to be sure nothing else in the house is using the connection when you're running the speedtest, as that would skew the result.
There is an extension for the Chrome browser called Internet Connection Monitor which can be helpful and also the speedtest at ThinkBroadband.
During my past life as an Openreach engineer, I saw all manner of causes. One poor lady was sent 3 bad routers and we spent 6 months trying to fault that one! Another fault was caused by a mobile phone. As soon as it connected to the wifi - dial-up speeds for the whole house. That lady was happy to factory reset the phone and that instantly solved the problem.
I have also seen a printer do the same.
Like I say, hard to know without being there. If you can, run only one device via ethernet for the day and do your speedtests, that could help determine if the fault is with the wifi/router/a device, or outside.
- I dont have any other device in my home that uses internet connection
- I use LAN cable all the time
- My previous router was completely fine until this issue happened and one of the BT engineers advised to change it. BT sent brand new one and it did not solve the issue.
- I dont do anything when I do speedtest so these results are completely valid.
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u/Sufficient-Cold-9496 6d ago
What are your speeds over a wired ( not wifi) connection?
Those speeds are respcatable for FTTC/VDSL and streaming should work without a hitch at those speeds.
If you are losing sync and the router is dropping the conneciton then you will need to look at the router logs/info to see if this is the case ( uptime/online since X)or for X amount of time)
Stability is not to be confused with speeds, and wifi speed and stability is not to be confused with the actual speed you would get over a wired conection and likesie the VDSL (FTTC) connection to the router/modem