Tip - Slow NBN caused by phone sockets

[JimsShed]

I learnt something this week. My NBN 25/5 plan was running at 10/1 at best. Aussie Broadband’s tests showed a theoretical max of 12/3. Then I discovered other people nearby were getting much better speeds. So I rang Aussie BB support to get some help. We discussed the usual aspects of infrastructure blah blah then he asked how many spare phone sockets I have in the house. I said 3 but nothing plugged into them. He told me to get them physically disconnected except for the socket with the NBN router. So I did and I immediately got 23/3 speeds!
Apparently the sockets cause the signal to bounce around and degrade.
Jim

[Kunama]

You were lucky Jim, only having three in the house, my son's apartment had 7 wall sockets all running on the same line....... after speaking to Aussie Support we disconnected 6 of them........... end result 47.7 Down/17.6 Up !!! (50 Plan). Our house has only one Telstra point and a dozen TransACT sockets, the Telstra point being the only useable one gives us 47.5/ 17.4 (just checked)

[multiweb]

I got a dedicated socket just for the NBN then used the old socket to link all the phones inside the house on another loop throught the modem. I got as high as 50/25 but had to throttle down to under 40 because the line was unstable as we still have ~500m of ageing copper outside to the node.

[LewisM]

You be quiet over there...showoff.

On the outskirts of Cannotberra we get:

5.19 Mbps download

0.20 Mbps upload

Latency: 24 ms


If I hear anyone b!tch about slow internet, I'll come around and hack you :P

(and yes, we only have ONE socket connected - I disconnected the old ones here)

[AndyG]

My sincere condolences for those on a poor medium.

When we looked for our house to buy, Fibre NBN was a requirement. Strangely, in Townsville, its the old (and often crappy) suburbs who all got new fibre laid. The nice new(ish) estates all got no NBN for the longest time, then eventually FTTN or fixed wireless. Unless it was a greenfields install, the new estates were stuffed. Another sad option in some greenfields was Telstra Velocity (single vendor).

Our budget limited us to a "crappy" suburb house. That said, life wouldn't be quite the same without 100/40. Bonus is, we have potential for much more on this connection, if the need ever eventuated.

[LewisM]

Just checked NBN rollout again for us. They shifted it later yet again:

Planned to be available from
Apr-Jun 2019*
Note: Some premises may require more work before they are ready to connect.

Register for email alerts
Planned technology
nbn™ Fibre to the Curb (FTTC)*

[AndyG]

That's good to hear. You should be very happy from that point on. Where possible, get contractor to re-run your copper from the pit to your house. Shouldn't cost too much, and you'll be new from end to end then.

[LewisM]

They have already done that - we all got new copper here. Watched them doing it right outside our door.

Just waiting for them to tie it all in to the exchange etc. Telstra finished all the cabling etc about a month ago.

[mynameiscd]

Skymuster here and I'm not saying anything.......

[kalon]

I ditched HFC for 4G some months ago. Ovo (Optus) and now Optus retail thanks to their generous data allowances. Teamed up with a mate down the road, packaged our connections and data pools, and now we get 120/40Mbps with 475GB allowance and costs just only marginally more than only one of us used to pay.


Of course, 4G isn't for everyone, especially out of metro areas, but it is a viable alternative now.


(I'm an active contributor on Whirlpool on this exact topic)

[AndyG]

That's really good to hear. Double good if you didn't have to ask them to do it. The Copper can be good in small doses. I have a mate on FTTN (100m run?) who syncs at 108Mbit. His RSP product (100/40) is theoretically a bottleneck.

[Lee]

Not only removing excess sockets etc, renewing the one you have makes a difference. We had an ADSL line so down once due to corrosion in an old phone point. Our NBN was running 'OK', when I moved our point though, I cut the phone line, stripped back to some clean copper and soldered a new length of cable to it and ran that to a new socket, up/down speeds doubled immediately....

[Exfso]

I had a dedicated Cat 6 line installed from the Jbox on our eaves to the wall where my modem is connected, probably have a dozen old type phone sockets around the house all are totally disconnected at the wall plugs and at the Jbox.

[DarkArts]

I had my house wired for data. New CAT6 from the junction box on the outside wall to a central point (where the NBN router is). Then, I have a bunch of adjacent sockets (which connect to Ethernet ports on the NBN router) giving a star distribution of CAT6 to all the other rooms in the house.

The two old phone sockets were disconnected and replaced with CAT6/RJ45 sockets wired into the new system.

[JimsShed]

Thanks for that. I think this should be my next job. AussieBB have retested my line and their new measured limit is now 42 down and 9.3 up if I step up to the next plan level which is 50/20.

Jim

[Terry B]

Not to show off but FTTP can be very good. This is my work taken this morning with others using the system. I only pay for 50/5 on the NBN.
They seem to be happy to give much faster than that.

[kalon]

Nice work, Terry!


I think I'll stick with my 4G - I am in the middle of Sydney, though, so not apples with apples...


https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/2945580636 - 319/43Mbps

[gary]

Hi Jim,

I gather the spare phone sockets were connected to the same twisted
pair that runs out to the street? That is, they were on the same line
that the NBN boxes use to connect to the external network?

If that were the case and the installer left the existing spare phone
sockets still connected to the same line that goes out to the network,
then that sounds negligent.

By way of background the signals coming down the twisted pair outside
in the street to your house will have relatively fast "rise times".

The speed of light is disappointingly slow and travels only about 1 foot
(300mm) in a nanosecond (one billionth of a second).

When a signal travels down a wire, it travels at a fraction of the speed
of light.

When the signal's rise times become faster than the distance it travels
down a pair of wires, then you are in the domain of what engineers
refer to as transmission line theory.

The wires themselves have what is referred to as a characteristic
impedance (an effect of resistance, inductance and capacitance) and
just like when you tie one end of a rope onto a brick wall and flick
the other end to send a pulse wave down it, when the pulse hits the
end tied to the brick wall it will bounce back.

So engineers have to terminate the line with an impedance that matches
the characteristic impedance of the line itself to avoid reflections and
the signal thus interfering with itself. The NBN box would have this
termination.

But add unterminated branches to the transmission line such as unused
phone sockets and you could have multiple reflections which would
degrade your network performance.

Any additional phone lines should have just come from the appropriate
sockets on your modem.

If this is what happened in your case, then it begs the question how many
other FTTN and FTTC network connections have been improperly
installed around the continent.

[multiweb]

Great explanation Gary. That was exactly my problem. The NBN Co contractor who came to my place, in between two other Telstra Tech visits ended up making a new lines off the wall in the street and looped all the other sockets (in house line) at the back of the modem so that was isolated from the feed off the street. He picked up the problem straight away and said it should never have been set this way by the first tech. He added it would have worked but dropped often and the connection would have been unreliable. So my guess is a lot of installations would be bodged. Maybe not new ones but migrations from old ADSL services to NBN certainly.

[gary]

Thanks Marc and Merry Christmas! :)



I am flabbergasted that they are sending installers out that would
get this wrong.

It really is so fundamental and not that difficult to train someone to do.

Plus it would be so easy to check that each phone socket is now on
the premises side of the modem and not going out on the network.

Having to send multiple people out to try and troubleshoot what should have
been done correctly the first time makes no economic sense either.

They could have pulled an optical fibre through using the existing twisted
pair as a draw cord and then there would have been no way to get it wrong.

You are lucky to get it sorted. There are probably plenty of poor souls
out there with the same problem getting the run around.

[multiweb]

Same to you and all the best for 2019 mate. :thumbsup:


Contractors are outsourced to the lowest bidder. In the case of Telstra I recall a conversation I had with an old Telstra service guy at the joiner box pit in the street in front of my house about 15 years ago. He was about to retire and probably one of the last that were actually employed by Telstra. At the time I was moving from dialup to ADSL1 circa 2004 I reckon. He was lamenting about the "young ones" (outsourced contractors) being paid on a per job basis regardless if they spent 5min or 1h to sort out a problem so the incentive for them was to get in an out and clock the most amount of jobs per day as he had a fixed wage whether he was doing 10 or 20 jobs in the same period of time.



My migration from ADLS2 to NBN was a complete nightmare and went something like that. It was originally scheduled as 3 visits:

1_ Telstra Tech comes in and installs the modem
2_ NBN co tech comes in disable ADSL and connect NBN + phones
3_ Telstra tech follows up to make sure everything works.

I initiated the process in September 2017 and I had reliable NBN completed in May 2018. Between January 2018 and February I had no landline and patchy internet. Telstra, NBN Co, Telco Ombusdman, Telstra legal service, you name it and miles of emails and paper trails and refunds and apologies and what not. It 's working now but nobody made it simple.

[Merlin66]

Hmmmm
OK I think I understand (to a point), but...
How do you disconnect unused phone sockets???
I have the NBN connected but I'm pretty sure no one visited to disconnect all the other sockets ( I have two still on the wall)

[multiweb]

You don't. You make sure the existing phone sockets in the house are wired after the modem and not connected to the same incoming copper line as the NBN before the modem.

[Merlin66]

Ok, but I think this is not the case, the original phone connection and distribution within the house remains as was.....
Do I need an NBN techie to check the premises????

[AndyG]

I was yarning with an old Contractor (who used to be Telecom) about this a few months ago. He described a system which was essentially like Medicare, a code for a job, and payment for a code. More codes completed per day = more dough in the bank.

I always picked mangoes faster when I was paid per box. Sometimes I would skip past the higher, smaller mangoes to get to the fatter ones...

[julianh72]

Phone sockets are typically interconnected by a possible combination of "daisy chain" (in series) and / or "star" (radiating back to a common point). In all the phone sockets, the respective contacts are inter-connected to all sockets, so you can plug a phone or ADSL modem into any socket.

FTTN / FTTC use much higher frequencies than voice / ADSL, and you can get major interference issues with any un-terminated lengths of cable, bad joins, etc. You want your internet line to run directly from the street to your modem, with no "branch" lines along the way or even "downstream" of the modem. Home owners have reported significant speed improvements by getting their phone points re-terminated after installation of NBN FTTN or FTTC.

If your modem is going to go at the first phone socket from the street, it is a simple job for a licensed cabler to simply disconnect all "piggy-backed" (downstream) sockets, which can be abandoned in place, or may be able to be re-used for your landline phone service (if you retain one after switching to NBN) by installing a second phone socket adjacent to the incoming socket, and connecting the "piggy-backed" sockets to that point.

If your modem location is at the second or subsequent point on the incoming line, all "upstream" sockets need to be removed and the cables rejoined cleanly, and all "downstream" sockets need to be isolated from the incoming internet line.

NBN will connect your existing phone line to the FTTN or FTTC system, but all of this in-home cabling improvement is the home-owner's responsibility to provide, at the home-owner's expense. (This is one of the hidden costs of the Abbott & Turnbull "cheaper, faster, more affordable" MTM.)

There is some general information on the NBN web site, if you go hunting for it:
https://www2.nbnco.com.au/residential/learn/optimisation/in-home-optimisation#wiring
https://www.nbnco.com.au/develop-or-plan-with-the-nbn/new-developments/design-build-install/cabling

[luka]

Nicely said Andy, they all just want to complete jobs as quickly as possible. In new NBN roll-out areas they just do the straightforward installs. Any difficulty and the house gets skipped.

As an example, we don't have NBN but the house behind us does. In a 4-townhouse block next to us the first and the fourth townhouse are connected to NBN but two middle ones are not. On the other side similar story, the front unit is connected but the back is not.

And to make things worse, 8 months ago when they were laying fiber optic cables they did something and basically halved our ADSL speeds :mad2:

So no surprise about the dodgy installs

[Merlin66]

Julian,
Appreciate the reply...but it honestly doesn’t help me...
Should I ask NBN or my NBN supplier TPG??????
Who are “lincensed cablers”????

[doppler]

"NBN will connect your existing phone line to the FTTN or FTTC system, but all of this in-home cabling improvement is the home-owner's responsibility to provide, at the home-owner's expense. (This is one of the hidden costs of the Abbott & Turnbull "cheaper, faster, more affordable" MTM.)"

My copper from the pit in the street out front to the house is not good, do I have to pay for a cabler to replace the wires from the street to my modem, and then pay again when they upgrade the network to fibre to the premises?

[DarkArts]

Many electricians are also licensed data cablers - if unsure, just ask for their license number. You can look in the yellow pages for "phone cablers" or "data cablers" if you want. You don't need a specialist NBN or "internet" technician.

You want a short, well terminated line from street (external junction box) to NBN (VDSL2) modem. As long as that same incoming copper terminates cleanly at one and only one socket, you should be fine.

If your phone sockets are daisy chained, pick the first one (the one wired to the street/junction box), which is usually the one physically closest the street (but check that to be sure) and disconnect the downstream wires.

[julianh72]

Fixing the internal wiring is the home owner's responsibility, to be arranged with your own Contractor - neither your RSP nor the NBN will probably want anything to do with it at all, but they MIGHT point you in the right direction (if you're lucky enough to make contact with someone who knows what they are talking about!)

Most major electricians will have licensed data cablers - or you can look at this Whirlpool list https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/central_splitter_installers or this website of registered data cablers http://www.registeredcablers.com.au/find-cablers/

[julianh72]

If you are getting FTTN or FTTC, they will try to re-use the existing copper phone lines. (Other MTM technologies do not use the existing phone lines.)

NBN is responsible for the entire connection up to and including the point of connection within the home. You should not need to do anything about getting the copper out to the street upgraded. If they are able to achieve 25 Mbps when the connection is made, they will declare the job a "success"; if not, they may replace the copper, or declare your property to be a problem ("more work is required") which they will get back to eventually (by 2020 - or maybe later ...)

Note that the deployment is actually being carried out by contractors, and they have some discretion as to exactly what remedial work they will do in each area in which they work - but in general, they are paid on a per-premises basis, so they will try to get in and out as quickly as possible, and in practice, this means a lot of "difficult" homes are skipped in the initial roll-out.

[E23]

Terry

You forgot "Thank you Barnaby Joyce"

Merry Christmas all

Andras

[Terry B]

:D:D:D
We are in the first streets in Australia to get NBN although it took 2 years to get it connected because we are a business and needed a corporate plan which wasn't available at the time. All good now though.

[The_bluester]

I would suggest millions (Mainly FTTN given they are really only just gathering steam on FTTC)


I had to disconnect the phone extensions at a mates place for exactly the same reason. They don't even look at it, they come in, plonk the modem down plug it in and if it syncs up and works, job done.


The difference in his case was not as stark but it was still there, they were not the winners of nodelotto and even now only just top 25mbps so they must be an unfavorable distance from the node or have poor copper, though they are in a relatively new estate.

[julianh72]

Virtually none of the millions of premises which will be connected to FTTN or FTTC will get the internal wiring rectified by the NBN contractors when they are connected. Most existing homes in Australia would have two or more phone points. Almost all of those homes will get a sub-optimal FTTN / FTTC internet connection if the home wiring isn't fixed.

In many cases, the connection is "good enough" (especially if you're only going for a 25 Mbps connection or slower), but if you want to get the best internet connection you can, you really should look at testing your synch speeds, and getting the wiring fixed.

As I said - this is one of the hidden costs of the Abbott & Turnbull "cheaper, faster, more affordable" MTM - and most people aren't even aware that it is an issue.

[Exfso]

The NBN techs are worse than useless, I had all sorts of dropout issues, had something in the order of 12 visits by NBN before the problem was found by an ex Telstra Tech. Up until then I had this procession of Indian lads who had absolutely no idea of what the problem was and at one stage one of them called some number in India and supposedly found out that I had internal issues within my house causing the problem. How someone in India could find this out is beyond me, but in any case after 6 months of me getting p1ssed off and the ombudsman getting involved it took this ex Telstra tech to find I had a high resistance in the line from my house to the pole. He replaced the wire and since then all good.:screwy:

[julianh72]

Maybe that Indian guy who keeps ringing me really IS from the Windows Help Desk, and he really can fix my computer?!

[sharpiel]

Only if his name is Koothrapali ;)

[The_bluester]

Absolutely agree. It all boils down to what was posted above about techs getting a job rate, so long as it passes the techs wont spend the 30 seconds it takes with a screwdriver, or Krone tool if the house is younger, to disconnect lines heading inwards form the demarcation point. The buggers even fit the modems on peoples kitchen benches, next to the sink, if that is where what they reckon is the first socket happens to be. Better for them to be off tot he next job.


A mate was working for a tier two contractor until recently (When they moved him from a technical into a finance role, and then the (Perth) finance man he was now working for decided he did not want to have his offsider in Melbourne where the techs were)


Talking to him over the last year, the margins for what they were doing (The street work on the cooper for FTTC) were so thin that any revisit for any reason to a job site left that one underwater. Literally if they missed one photo for the as-built pack (Without which they wont get paid) and had to go back from the next job two streets away, the time cost meant it was a loss maker, potentially on both jobs.

[doppler]

So true, my FTTN connection was only getting around 12mbs download, TPG'S solution was to refund me 12 months of overcharging for a plan that my line speed couldn't deliver, and put me on the basic plan.