TELECOM 247

PCPaul wrote in message
news:vT3dj.69051$c 1.4515@text.news.blueyonder.co.uk...

Like you, I am about three miles from my exchange and use a DG834.

Maybe like you, I see the noise margin degrade during the evening period. At
6AM it is about PLUS 6dB, at 6PM it can be as low as MINUS 1dB.

Unlike you, my connect speed is 2.5 to 3.0Mbps - so maybe Im lucky and/or
you arent.

Id guess that the variation is due to crosstalk over the four or so miles
of cable, and that it gets worse in the evenings as that is when there is
more data traffic to crosstalk. I doubt that it is to do with actual
darkness as at this time of the year, 6AM is dark - plus that at the height
of summer, when 6PM is still bright daylight, the degradation profile is
just the same!

I got the DG834 for the reason you mention, and find that it works well down
to zero dB margin, but will fail, about every ten minutes, when the margin
becomes negative and so, initially, I tried to minimise how often I used the
system between 6 and 9PM. This wasnt too difficult as, like yourself, this
is primarily a work connection. If the line did drop, I would disconnect
next morning (disconnect via router dialog and then physically disconnect
the power lead and phone line from the router) for a couple of minutes and
then reconnect. This meant that I spent very little time with a poor
profile - and this seems to have stuck - hence my 2.5Mbps service. The only
other thing I did was to swap over the phone line pair. This makes quite a
difference to the drop rate here and has had the same effect for others.
Might be worth a try. (If it works for a while than reverts, BTW, swap them
again as - most likely - some oik has been up the pole/in the cabinet and
has re-swapped your pair!)

BTW, there is a bug in the DG834 software whereby it reports -1dB as
+2,147,483,648dB Noise Margin. If only!

My Line Attenuation is -53dB, what is yours?

HTH