Easiest way to check for line drops?

[gingerbeardman]

Thought I'd chime in here.

I am new to Billion and am an SSE customer. I'm on their £12.50pcm 18 month deal.
Signup was slow (one month) but I am now connected and happy.

Attenuation is 41.0 here beside the Regent's Canal in King's Cross, London. (no fibre or cable on my street)

SSE router (Technicolor TG582n, not as bad as its reputation would have you believe) was getting ~9000 sync rate plug and play.
Web GUI spells out that the SSE router has had some tweaking done whilst they set it up for the customer.

Billion by default was getting ~8000 with a 12.1 SNR

I manually adjusted the Billion with value 65535 for target SNR of 6.1 and a now sync rate of ~10000
A far cry from my 38Mb infinity line that I just moved away from, but such is life.

Max sync rate currently showing 12036

We'll see how it goes over the coming week

Any tips or advice appreciated.

[chazzo]

Thanks gingerbeardman. Glad to hear that SSE seems to be giving good service. I'm still not sure whether SSE package would be cheap from a non-LLU exchange, though. All the other providers here charge nearly as much as BT do for line rental. However, I seemed to get most of the way through SSE's signup process without being told that it would cost more than their headline rate.

I'm not sure I'd notice the difference between 8000 and 10,000, especially if contention starts to kick in (or just slowness elsewhere on the network). But in any case, perhaps the 7800N is not the perfect choice for you? What about a more modern router with 5 GHz wireless, to take advantage of your higher line speeds?

[gingerbeardman]

I'm not sure I'd notice the difference between 8000 and 10,000, especially if contention starts to kick in (or just slowness elsewhere on the network).

It's noticeable, believe me! 25% faster!

But, yes, contention, throttling, etc. are all still in play.

But in any case, perhaps the 7800N is not the perfect choice for you? What about a more modern router with 5 GHz wireless, to take advantage of your higher line speeds?

Not sure what you mean here. If my line is limited to 10,000 (10 megabit/sec, 1.25megabytes/sec) then what good would better wireless inside the house do me?

Maybe I'm missing something?

[chazzo]

If my line is limited to 10,000 then what good would better wireless inside the house do me?

For those of us on very long lines, ADSL bandwidth is obviously the limiting factor. My understanding is that as line speed increases, the wireless link -- if you're using one, of course -- could become the bottleneck. But I agree that at 10,000 you shouldn't see any difference.

Looking back at tests on my own network, I measured (with iPerf) 40-55 Mbit/s over wireless from a BT HH3 with 802.11n, even though it's supposed to deliver 130 Mbit/s, and just 29 Mbit/s over a "200" Powerline network. So with your previous FTTC connection, LAN speed might have been an issue depending on what kit you have.

I've always understood that's the reason we now have 802.11ac, 5 GHz, wide channels and all that malarky. Not of much interest to those of use who are grateful to get 5 Mbit/s.