Guess what I have been through the endless try this / tick that / reinstall it etc etc loop, so I would be *very* interested to know if buying microfilters for your unused phone sockets did in fact cure the problem. I have never heard that suggested before, certainly not by customer “service” reps at the end of a 50p per minute helpline.

I’ll give that a go. I also got a telephone call from the BT Broadband Line Test people to say that my line should now be okay, which implied that there was something amiss.

The connection has now been up for 1 day and 2 hours, which is the longest it has remained connected for a week. So that is good news.

I got a good response by e-mail from my friend Rich who suggested that I turn my router the right way up! And as for my 8 Mbps connection, I do feel very fortunate. In Edinburgh I had a 10 Mbps cable connection with Telewest Blueyonder, then in Cellardyke my connection averaged out around 4-5 Mbps. At the university my connection is fabulously quick: I downloaded a 25MB file in 7 seconds the other day.

does that mean EVERY socket, even if there is nothing plugged into them?

Exactly, yes it does! Installation instructions always tend to be vague on this detail - perhaps because you can get away with it in some situations and not in others. It took me ages trawling through online forums before I picked up on this nugget of information. Fortunately microfilters are cheap!

Your figures above look quite respectable (and I’m jealous of your 8Mb data rate! Here in the sticks of the English home counties I can only get 1Mb - and that only recently upgraded from 512Kb!). But we try to fit digital pegs into an analog world! Obviously the figures are not going to look disasterous - you had a connection. But the line attenuation (and hence the noise margin) will vary up and down with the time of day, weather, temperature, traffic, load at the exchange, number of birds resting on the line, whether Easter falls early this year, etc. And below a certain noise margin, your box will drop the connection.

The microfilters on unused extensions essentially stop them acting as aerials in the house - and so improve the noise margin figure seen at your box by quite a few dB - and hence will hopefully stop it falling over.

Cheers,
Martin

does that mean EVERY socket, even if there is nothing plugged into them?

Here are the statistics from my router log:

And 23 hours is now the longest that it’s been up in the last week, which has to be good news.

This may be an obvious question (and my apologies if it is!) but do you have microfilers plugged into all your sockets - extensions and master?

When I originally set my gateway/router up, it wasn’t obvious (to me anyway, ahem!) that this needed to be done. The result was a very iffy noise to signal ratio on the gateway which meant that the box could sometimes grab the ADSL link and sometimes not. Took me weeks of trial and error before I stumbled across the solution. The problem repeated when one of the young people in our house ‘accidentally’ unplugged a microfilter without telling anyone. Or could be that one of your microfilters got bashed in the house move perhaps? What S/N ratios is your box reporting?

Cheers,
Martin

No sooner had I posted that comment and my connection dropped out!

*sobs uncontrollably*

What I have done, which was the only thing I hadn’t tried, is replace the RJ11 cable that connects the microfilter to the modem/router. (That’s the cable with two identical small, square-ended plugs that look like mini network cables (RJ45).)

I found the replacement one in my Big Boy’s Box of Interesting Geeky Toys. It’s for a Psion modem!

And so far, the connection has stayed up for over 3 hours. I’m going to laugh if that was the problem!