Networks Any telecomms engineers in? [Update - Aug 2011 Broadband Problems]

Hmm. I'll try it later then. Still not entirely convinced tbh! But I think I'll understand it better once I actually go and look at it. So for the record, the blue and blue&white from the phone line are going to pins 4 and 5 on the RJ-45 female module, which are colour coded the same way. Then it's just an RJ45 male to BT female and the relevant filter after that before the phone line?

 

If you terminate in your socket as a normal straight through Cat5e cable pins 4 and 5 will be the blue solid and blue stripe, which need to go on points 2 and 5 in your BT socket at the other end, is I think the consensus here

 

dont bother buying seperate phone cable, just use your cat5e cable

 

You didn't read the thread. The phone cable is already there, as an extension. I want to change the faceplate only.

 

Just bumping this for your opinion on these? That would pretty much solve my problem wouldh't it? It's a BT socket that will fit on an Excel faceplate along with some RJ-45's and save all the hassle and headaches of having to wire standard phone cable to the back of an RJ-45 module. I'm really afraid of blowing the phone line if I wire it wrong...

 

I"m not absolutely sure of the wiring over there, but that looks right. You should be able to find a square RJ11 socket that pops into one of the square holes on the faceplate. if there are no extra whatnots on the back of the existing outlet plate then you should be able to go straight into the center two pins of the RJ11 jack and pop it in.

 

I know this is a monster post but please take 5 minutes and read it

I'm bumping this for a couple of reasons, the first being some queries about connection quality. This is going to be a long post but to describe this accurately and in enough detail, it has to be. Here we go; For the past few weeks my o2 broadband connection has been quite slow. When I say quite slow, I mean dreadfully slow. We get a sync speed of over 7Mb/s but it gets throttled back to less than 2Mb/s because of iPlayer, Youtube etc. The throttling I have learned to live with, but the problem I am having now is with the ping. And it's a weird problem, one that I have been unable to get to the bottom of which is why I am asking for help here. I'm actually desperate at this point...

Here's the setup - I have an o2 Wireless Box II branded Thomson tg585v7 router running in bridged mode - that runs a connection into a modified Linksys WRT54GL - this is usually a modified Linksys WRT320N but that's on loan to a friend at the moment for another network diagnosis so I am back to the WRT54GL. The mods include internal heatsinking, larger antennae, a cooling fan and the DD-WRT firmware. Both this and the WRT320N have been literally bulletproof, rock solid routers for me. I have never had a single problem with either of them. So anyway, the connection runs into that, and one port runs to the workshops gigabit switch, providing it with a connection, and another runs to the switch for the house, providing all the house ports with a connection. It's a system that in the past has worked flawlessly. If you've been following my netowrking project (link in sig) you'll know that I have plans to change the house wiring from CAT5 to CAT6a in the very near future, but that's irrelevant at this time. This problem is solely to do with the broadband quality.

In online games I usually get a ping (actual, not represented) of ~45ms. That's not bad considering I am on an "up to 8Mb/s" o2 legacy package that's still only costing me £12 per month. For the past 3 weeks, I have been playing CSS more at night time. This falls into o2's "peak time" sector of the day, so traffic like streaming and P2P are managed and the connection is throttled. My ping at these times has changed form being the normal, very playable 45-50ms to being no less than 80 and usually closer to 100. I only play on UK or EU servers, and the one that I frequent most often is hosted in London. Anyone who knows CSS knows that this sort of ping causes lag that makes the game unplayable. Here's what I've done to try and rectify the problem for the past 3 weeks:

-Checked no equipment/servers were downloading in the workshop. Lots of stuff runs down there 24/7, so I simply shut everything down one night to see if it made a difference. Nope.

-Checked that no wireless clients were using the connection. Checked using DD-WRT's DHCP monitoring panel. My iPhone and my laptop are usually always connected to it, so I disabled wireless on them and eventually took the drastic measure of turning off the Wireless AP. Nothing changed.

-Rebooted both the bridged mode o2 box and my router. Manually cleared the IP tables. Nothing changed.

-Unplugged every microfilter and phone in the house. Nothing changed, so I removed all the internal house teelephone extensions from the equation by plugging into the test socket. Speed jumped from less than 2Mb/s to over 7, but my ping in games stayed at over 100.

-Took the o2 box out of bridged mode, used it to route all the traffic instead of the Linksys router. Nothing changed. Also tried this with the o2 box plugged into the test socket, same thing.

-Tried a completely new, just out of the box o2 Wireless box II (another Thomson TG585v7). No change.

-Checked all NIC drivers etc on my main work and gaming rigs. Everything up to date. No downloads, updates or any other network traffic active whilst I was testing this. Still 100 ping in CSS.

-Checked my CSS client config - I run an autoexec with custom settings, still a modified (for the CSS 2010 update) version of the one I used for Enemy Down league matches when I was running the clan team. Nothing wrong here either. I know what each and every setting in the CSS Client config does and how to make sure the client side cvars are all set correctly for smooth and *normally* lag-free gameplay.

-Eventually called o2. "Must be the peak time congestion" I thought. I got through to "o2 second line support" who went through basically all te stuff that's listed above. Of all the o2 broadband tech support guys I talked to (that's 6, for the record), all but one out and out denied that the problem was on their end. They all gave me the "the problem is your internal wiring because when you plug into the test socket your speedtest results go to 7Mb/s with a 35ms ping" but none of them were listening - despite the 35ms ping on speedtest.net and pingtest.net, I was STILL getting an ingame ping of over 100ms and never lower than 80ms. And NONE of them would listen when I told them that after 1am and up until 5pm, the ingame ping was fine, and never jumped above 60ms. "No no no, it's something to do with your internal wiring, or your bridged mode router, or interference on your line at certain times of the day" etc etc.

-The one guy that I spoke to who was able to tell me more than all that was just last night - he noted than my noise margin had been upped from the usual 6dB to 9dB in late 2009 because of a complaint about the connection dropping all the time. I vaguely recalled this. He also refreshed the port that my connection was on at the o2 hub. That changed the sync speed again, and got me over 8Mb/s, but the ping problem ingame remained. He then went and spoke to one of his colleagues, who was an online gamer himself, and that guy was able to tell my guy that for o2 to "look into" a complaint of a high ping, it would have to be 200 or above, and that 90 wouldn't be enough for an investigation.

So at this point I have done so much testing and spoken to so many broadband tech support staff members that I am 99.99% convinced that it is o2's peak time congestion that is causing this and that my internal setup is absolutely fine. It is extremely weird though, that despite o2's staff repeatedly telling me that the only things they manage traffic for is streaming video and P2P downloads, my ping on pingtest.net is 35ms and my ping to any UK or EU server in CSS is well over 80ms.

WHY. Please, I'm begging anyone to make any suggestion as to why this is happening. Apart from CSS not being playable between the hours of 5pm and 1am (which for me may as well be never) I am tearing my hair out over this because I can't figure it out. If a customer came to me with the exact problem I am having I would be totally embarassed about not being able to find out what the problem is. This has been going on for over 3 weeks now and I have done everything I can think of to solve it or at least eliminate all possibilities.

If I can't get to the bottom of this, my last move in all this is going to be showing o2 the door, with a formal letter of complaint to both them and Ofcom, describing every detail of the problem and how my new ISP (which if it comes to that will be chosen very carefully) can provide me with a connection that is constant and stable all the time.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you in advance for any help.