Rate adaptive ADSL.

At the moment I have a 512/256 (576/288) (fixed rate) ADSL link.
It goes down a few times a week, for a couple of minutes or so.

Is it possible to simply contact my ISP, and they'll call BT, and
a few minutes later my modem will retrain to a lower speed rather
than sitting sulking for minutes?
How often will it try to train back up, as 99.5% of the time it's
working fine at full speed.

"Ian Stirling" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:Co9yb.14689$(E-Mail Removed)...
> At the moment I have a 512/256 (576/288) (fixed rate) ADSL link.
> It goes down a few times a week, for a couple of minutes or so.
>
> Is it possible to simply contact my ISP, and they'll call BT, and
> a few minutes later my modem will retrain to a lower speed rather
> than sitting sulking for minutes?

No - all 512K ADSL lines are now RADSL (for upload only), even if they were
originally "fixed rate" and have been ever since BT Wholesale introduced
RADSL.

One the 1 and 2MB products are now "fixed rate".

It sounds like you may have a line/exchange fault of some description -
report it to your ISP and they can get BT to look into it.

Besides if you qualified for the old "fixed rate" limits, I doubt thats the
problem anyway - most people on RADSL get the full speed even if they are
much further away under the new limits for RADSL and the retraining is done
automatically on connecting.. so you would have noticed a change in your
upload connection speed etc

Regards
Sunil

Sunil Sood <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
> "Ian Stirling" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:Co9yb.14689$(E-Mail Removed)...
>> At the moment I have a 512/256 (576/288) (fixed rate) ADSL link.
>> It goes down a few times a week, for a couple of minutes or so.
>>
>> Is it possible to simply contact my ISP, and they'll call BT, and
>> a few minutes later my modem will retrain to a lower speed rather
>> than sitting sulking for minutes?
>
> No - all 512K ADSL lines are now RADSL (for upload only), even if they were
> originally "fixed rate" and have been ever since BT Wholesale introduced
> RADSL.
>
> One the 1 and 2MB products are now "fixed rate".
>
> It sounds like you may have a line/exchange fault of some description -
> report it to your ISP and they can get BT to look into it.

Hmm.
I wonder if this might be a modem fault.
Looking at my logs of the routers status page (once a second) it's never
moved from full speed.
Then again, the downstream loss is varying significantly from 55.1db
all the way up to 63.9 (when I first looked at the SNR on the page, it
measured 63db, 2db lower than the 61db reported by the phone engineers
modem) which would argue for a fault.
Unfortunately, my line has had BT engineers crawl all over it and fix all
they could when trying to chase down an intermittent ISDN fault (that seemed
later fixed), and they claim to have replaced practically everything
that could be.
Hmm, I'll have to dig out my old logs and see if there is any correlation
with the fault times on ISDN.
Thanks.
I'll also have to setup something that goes "bing" when the connection
dies to see if I can hear anything over the phone.
And swap the RJ11 lead.

In article <bqbajp$2153ni$(E-Mail Removed)>, Sunil Sood wrote:
> > Is it possible to simply contact my ISP, and they'll call BT, and
> > a few minutes later my modem will retrain to a lower speed rather
> > than sitting sulking for minutes?
>
> No - all 512K ADSL lines are now RADSL (for upload only), even if they were
> originally "fixed rate" and have been ever since BT Wholesale introduced
> RADSL.
>
In other words, the same scheme as has been used by dial-up modems for years.
I wonder why they didn't use this from the start?

Rod.

"Roderick Stewart" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> In article <bqbajp$2153ni$(E-Mail Removed)>, Sunil Sood
wrote:
> > > Is it possible to simply contact my ISP, and they'll call BT, and
> > > a few minutes later my modem will retrain to a lower speed rather
> > > than sitting sulking for minutes?
> >
> > No - all 512K ADSL lines are now RADSL (for upload only), even if they
were
> > originally "fixed rate" and have been ever since BT Wholesale introduced
> > RADSL.
> >
> In other words, the same scheme as has been used by dial-up modems for
years.
> I wonder why they didn't use this from the start?

If you make ADSL "too" rate adaptive its possible that the "stronger" ADSL
signals generated by poor lines can interfere with other ADSL lines. There
are also certain rules under the ANFP that all telco's have to follow

I guess BT were concerned about that - also note that they have only
introduced RADSL in the upstream direction so customers don't complain about
download speeds - as telco's in other countries have found with an higher
"maximum rate" but a "low" actual rate and BT can maintain a certain QofS
which makes it easier to sell other products on top of ADSL..

Regards
Sunil