The ISP Engineer arrived on Friday 17th as arranged and performed some testing with the client (I was running late but managed to arrive as he was leaving).
There were NO internal wiring or equipment issues and he had re-assembled the newly installed BT Master socket and put the equipment back as was when the fault was reported.
Line checks were showing no issues, but he could see the faults that have been reported but there was nothing he could do about it as it is thought that the problem lies outside the client’s premises (whether this was BT or the ISP network was unclear) and not to expect any immediate resolution.
A change was made to the clients profile and the line appeared to be stable.
I ran tests throughout the afternoon and whilst the line stayed up and was “connected”, the network should anywhere from 0% to 80% packet loss (just between the client’s router and the network gateway !) but when there was no loss, it was working around the 15-17Mb download mark as the router reported and there were no drops in connectivity (packet loss on the other hand was up and down like the proverbial yo-yo). Switiching to OpenDNS servers helped a little, but the bottleneck (due to packet loss) was on the ISP’s network gateway.
Until yesterday that is, when the connectivity problems re-occurred !
A drop in line speed again of just under 8Mb and then more disconnections today (Wednesday 22nd)
So it looks like the client is back to square one again ! It is approaching two months since the fault was initially raised and there appears to be no way of moving forward at this stage…..
Update (Wednesday 22nd 18:37)
Yet more outages, speed drops and errors including a new one relating to “call drop because echo reply not received in time”
