Broadband keeps dropping

[Mageo]

Hi

My broadband keeps randomly dropping out. Router Internet light suddenly goes out (other two lights stay on) and we lose connection. This can happen sometimes multiple times a day. Turning router off and on again does not solve the problem, the only thing that does is running the sky broadband diagnostic test and waiting for that to complete. 9 times out of 10 it says an issue has been detected and I need to book an engineer. Within 10 seconds of the diagnostic tests completing, the router is back up and running. 

However, we have so far had 3 sky engineers out (first one replaced the router and the socket, 2nd and 3rd ran line tests and said they could't find anything) and 2 Openreach engineers out (no idea what they did as they didn't come to the house!). 

I really am at a loss on what to do next, I can't keep waiting in for engineers who say they can't find an issue. Does anyone have any ideas?

[Chrisee]

@Mageo you have what appears to be a very long line which is shown by the fact you are only getting a signal on one of each of the downstream and upstream bands. Given the various work done so far it could just be down to line length, However what is your guaranteed minmum speed? Currently you are getting 16.9Mb/s down. 

[Mageo]

Hi, thanks for the reply

Our Guaranteed min speed is 10Mb/s. I might add that we've been here for 3 years and this issue has only been happening for the last 9ish months, was absolutely fine before that (i.e no noticable outages/downtime as opposed to - sometimes - multiple times a day I have to run the diagnostics).

[Saint+Viper]

Sounds like a very similar issue to what im suffering with atm - Again never had any issues, except for the last 9ish months...

[Chrisee]

@Mageo what can happen is your line is picking up noise from an outside source which is intermittent and causing the line to drop. Therfore the line tests as normal until the noise happens. As I expkained you are near the limits of what VDSL can operate over and so thst noise could be anywhere on the copper line from the cabinet to your home. One common cause is wet leaves hitting an overhead line as trees grow this becomes an issue. Openreach can trim branches where they can get to them but on what can be several kilometres of line finding the cause is difficult. Thst fault is worse in wet weather of course there are many other potential causes.

Openreach and Sky have done the normal things like fitting a a filtered master socket but you can raise another fault but I don't hold out much hope. One thought is to ask your neighbours if they have the same problem as multiple reports through their ISPs may get something done.to gind the cause.

@Saint+Viper you may have a similar fault but yhe cause could be completly different if you would like some help post your connection stats see Find your Sky Broadband router statistics

[Mageo]

Thanks, the neighbours are definitely suffering from similar drops, I will see if I can organise a concerted effort to report the our ISPs. Is there any way I can bypass the sky engineer visits and just keep escalating to openreach? It just seems a waste of everyone's time.

One of the neighbours has already got fed up and gone to 4G mobile broadband, we may end up doing similar.