Noise/interference on DSL line - Sky Digibox/Bad lines?

Hey all, I'm having trouble with my DSL connection at the moment and the ISP (Eircom) are proving consistently useless and careless about it.

We had a stable 2mbps (2048/256 asynchronous) DSL connection for a couple of years without any trouble, but in the past few months it has become frustratingly unstable - Dropping connection regularly, lucky to connect at 1mbps, etc

I contacted Eircom about this a number of times and they did nothing about it until I got angry and spoke to their customer services department, at which point they finally sent out an engineer to have a look at the lines.
The engineer determined that the cause of the poor connection was bad wiring in our house, so he doubled-up the wires from the phoneline point of entry to the DSL filter/splitter.
According to him, the reason why the signal deteriorated so much was because we're only just within range of the nearest exchange for a 2mbps connection and a spate of new connections in newly-built estates between us and the exchange have weakened the signal further.
The work he did on the lines within the house seemed to do the job, and we got back up to 2048/256 with a stable connection and no dropouts....for about 2 weeks.
The connection went back to being unstable and slow just a few days ago.

Anyway, I discovered some strange things going on that I'm hoping someone here could explain for me..

When the connection drops, making a call from the house-phone to my mobile usually forces the DSL to resync at a much-reduced speed, but there's a lot of audible noise on the phone line, enough to make a phone conversation impossible.
Additionally, after unplugging our 2 Sky Digiboxes from the phone line this morning the noise almost completely disappeared and the connection is currently synced-up at 2048/256.

So, is there anything I can do to prevent the Digiboxes from causing this noise on my line and interfering with my DSL connection?
Sky claim that both Digiboxes must be connected at all times or we lose our multi-room subscription, or receive a fine, or something along those lines.

Secondly, does anyone know of a way to force Eircom to improve the lines near where I live such that additional connections between our house and the exchange won't disrupt our connection again?
It seems wrong to me that a company like Eircom would willingly and permanently disrupt the service of existing customers so that they can install new customers.

Thanks for any advice.

 

You won't get a fine from Sky - we've had our digibox for about 14 months. The only time it's been plugged into the phone line was when the engineer came to install it.
I'm not sure about your multiroom though - all you can do is try it. If it does get cut off, claim that the line must have gotten knocked out.

 

I used to have HUGE sync issues at home a few years back. Our house was built after world war2 i think and so the Bt wiring in our house was pants when i wanted DSL, as the other extension sockets in our house constantly dropped the connection. After a good year of trying to find what the issue was and multipul tryout with vairous hardware a internal ADSL modem was the key but it still droped the line once in awhile.

What i did to counter this issue was to setup a wireless router on our primary socket and connect wirelessly, all other phone sockets have a filter even if there isnt anything connected to it.

Iam limited to just under 3meg due to the noise issues on the line. BT have actually physically replaced the phoneline outseide the house but its a internal thing.

As for the Sky boxes, i was told that they just dial out once in awhile just to regester themselfs at Sky to makesure the boxes are still at the property. Im sure if you filter those the issue should go away to some extent, if not just use a wireless router on your primary socket.

 

So long as the boxes are connected to the phone line via an ADSL filter you should be fine.
Got two boxes here connected and no problems, however if they are connected without a filter they can cause some problems.

@badders, if you have more than one Sky box you need to connect them to the phone line as you get a reduced subscription on the second, Sky want to make sure the reduced subs box is with the same customer.

 

sound like a simple micro filter fault.

As yoda said, you need a filter on all devices on the phone line - phones, sky boxes, house alarms, faxes etc. Putting a filter through a filter sometimes causes problems.

I can't see anything in your posts about them.

You say the re-sync speed is slow when you call you mobile, calling anything shouldn't make the dsl drop let alone re-sync.

Is it a DSL router or a USB modem?

 

The main incoming phone line is filtered with a wall-mounted filter/splitter that separates the signal into 2 sockets: 1 for DSL, 1 for phones
According to the Eircom technicians, filters aren't necessary with such a set-up, but I put filters on all of the other devices already anyway to no avail - it doesn't appear to be a filter issue.

The connection isn't dropping when phonecalls are made, but if a phonecall is made while the DSL is unsynced it picks up the signal and re-syncs itself.
The router is a DSL router which connects to the PCs via ethernet & wireless, a Netopia 3347 with Wireless transmitter.

Yoda is correct about the Sky multi-room. They don't usually care when it's a single box, but they police multi-room setups more strictly.

Phone circuit diagram for the set-up:

Code:

                                                                /------[DSL]---->[Router]
---[Incoming Phone line from exchange]--- [Filter/Splitter box]
                                                                \------[Phone & Digiboxes via 3-way splitter]

 

U might want to head to DSL reports, run the Tweak tests and make sure your system and everything is configured to be most effective with your line and quality that you are receiving.

http://www.dslreports.com/