Telephone causing broadband to drop.

[BolshieBastard]

My broadband connection is normally stable. Its been known to stay connected for 400+ hours.

Gets home tonight to be met by angry kids who say the broadband's been dropping when mum has been using the telephone, both incoming and outgoing calls.

Checked the router and the speed has dropped from nearly 6meg to 939kbs

Checked the router log in and it seems that from 12 April there's been problems. Connection has struggled to stay up for more than 12 hours at longest. In fact since 12 April, the router shows its had 18 sessions, some as short as 4 seconds! No wonder the speed has dropped.

I've raised a ticket with my isp.

Nothing in the house has changed. Apart from a line fault, any reason why the phone should suddenly start this problem?

[Clippy]

Duff filter on the line?

[MarillionFan]

Had something similar a while back. Turned out we'd clipped one of the wires outside the house when doing the gardening and it was shorting.

[gingerjedi]

I get this every time we have fine weather, the SNR goes up and down like a whores drawers and I get a crackle on the line. A bit of water on the string must make a better connection?

I've had BT out several times but they're never willing to trace the fault.

[Spoiler]

Had a similar issue, broadband would drop when the phone was used. 9 months later & approx 6 BT visits found a bad connection outside the house.

I would suggest doing the usual tests that BT would ask for:

- unplug everything from phone sockets
- plug bb & phone into master socket (or ideally the test socket if you have one)
- check if problem still occurs
- try a new filter

If it's still a problem, then it's probably something outside & time to call the phone company.

[VectraMan]

I get this every time we have fine weather, the SNR goes up and down like a whores drawers and I get a crackle on the line. A bit of water on the string must make a better connection?

I've had BT out several times but they're never willing to trace the fault.

Mine became very flakey a few weeks ago, with the SNR going up and down (and often going negative) and I've always had a bit of a noisy phone line. BT bloke came out last week, but although he said he couldn't find any fault or hear a noise, he replaced the connectors outside that "looked a bit old", and it's been completely reliable ever since.

Who knows? Maybe there was some other source of electrical noise from one of my neighbours, or down the street, that has gone away. Hard to be sure about any of this. The annoying thing is that the local exchange is virtually in my back garden, so I ought to have the best connection possible (22586kbps if you're curious).

[Spacecadet]

Had a similar issue, broadband would drop when the phone was used. 9 months later & approx 6 BT visits found a bad connection outside the house.

I would suggest doing the usual tests that BT would ask for:

- unplug everything from phone sockets
- plug bb & phone into master socket (or ideally the test socket if you have one)
- check if problem still occurs
- try a new filter

If it's still a problem, then it's probably something outside & time to call the phone company.

Call them anyway
They'll make you do the tests again, might aswell save the effort and just do them the once

[blacjac]

Might sound daft but do you have sky? If so is the sky box plugged into the phone line? If so does it have a microfilter in that socket?

Sounds strange but my folks had exactly this problem about 6 years ago and the BT engineer solved it. Apparantly when the phone rings it can trigger something in the Sky box, and if no Microfilter on that connection then the broadband suffers.

[Babbage]

Do you have a faceplate splitter in the master socket with your own wiring beyond that?
The faceplate splitter is so much better than having the splitter on every socket in the house, much more stable snr that way.

[VectraMan]

Do you have a faceplate splitter in the master socket with your own wiring beyond that?
The faceplate splitter is so much better than having the splitter on every socket in the house, much more stable snr that way.

You can buy them and fit DIY. Only problem then is you need to connect your router direct to the master socket.

BTW my ISP advised not telling BT about the broadband, but complaining about the phone line (which is what I did). If you tell them it's a broadband fault they're more likely to fob you off onto the ISP.