Intermittent DSL disconnects over the past several months

[lte5000]

Hi,

We've had Verizon Business DSL (3M/768k) for the past 6+ years.

It has mostly worked great (other than a few instances) until the last several months it has really gone downhill.

It will intermittently get a "spell" where the DSL light will be going from solid to blinking to solid to blinking.

This might last for 10 minutes up to a couple hours and then it will work great for the rest of the day.

I'm pretty sure it's not a modem issue, because we have 3 modems available for testing (all Westell 6100s) and they all do the same thing when the problem occurs.

Also, not sure if it is related, but there is a crackling noise at times on the phone line which the DSL comes over.

Another thing, last Friday I noticed our speed was bumped down to 1M/384K so I called Verizon and got them to put it back up, since then the disconnect problem seems to occur more frequently.

Anyway, today I called Verizon tech support and spoke with them about this problem.

The support person said we are 13,000 feet from the central office (borderline for DSL?).

He temporarily lowered the DSL line speed to 1M/384K for 24 hours, also he is sending us a new modem.

And, he said a tech will look into the problem more closely, do more tests, etc.

And if the speed decrease solves the problem he said we should call the billing department and make it permanent.

I don't understand why we can no longer have 3M/768K because that worked great for over 5 years.

Here are the transceiver stats from our modem (Westell 6100):

Transceiver Revision: 01.00.09.00   
Vendor ID Code:        4   
Line Mode:               G.DMT Mode   
Data Path:               Interleaved   
Transceiver Information Down Stream Path Up Stream Path 
DSL Speed (Kbits/Sec)     1792       448 
Margin (dB)               20.0       24.0 
Line Attenuation (dB)     48.5       27.0 
Transmit Power (dBm)      16.8       10.8 

Thank you for reading and any help/thoughts you may have!

[smith6612]

Away from the disconnects in your service, are you seeing any sort of slow-down with your service before or after the torrent of disconnects happen? When these disconnects occur, are you also seeing a "Red" Internet light or is your DSL light blinking for hours on end? Otherwise, those statistics look good. I can't see why you shouldn't have 2528/640 --> 3360/864 on your sync rate.

As for the crackling, I should also ask is the crackling worse while the DSL is having issues? If so, you've got a physical circuit issue you will need Verizon to repair, but only if it shows up even at your NID. This is a job for Voice repair, not DSL repair.

A relative of mine, if you have the "blinking for hours on end" issue was discovered to have been suffering from a congestion issue on an old remote DSLAM, which caused disconnects during higher traffic times. We can try to rule this out as we go along.

[lte5000]

Thanks for the reply, Smith6612.

OK, it looks now like we probably will switch to Comcast.

We've been talking about doing this for months, but I think it is actually going to happen now, (just waiting on the site survey to decide for sure).

So I suppose we can put up with the 1.5M/384K speeds for a couple weeks if need be...

Still, to answer your questions, not sure about the noise and the DSL issue happening at the same time, but that is something I will check.

The modem Internet light is never on because the modem is in bridge mode with a Linksys WRT54G router. 

As for the DSL light blinking; it can get a spell that lasts for a couple hours where the Internet connection will be going up and down and up and down every few minutes.

I don't usually even look at the modem lights, but I have an alert service that sends a text to my phone when the Internet goes down (or back up). This service is checking every two minutes I believe.

And I will sometimes get twenty or thirty of those alerts in a row.

So, thanks for your help, but we will likely be leaving Verizon no matter the outcome of this.

I will update this thread if something doesn't work out and we have to stick with Verizon.

Thanks!

[smith6612]

Sounds like a plan to me :). Send me a PM if you still need help and I don't answer back to this thread. Make sure you get a DOCSIS 3 modem with Comcast to "future proof" things a bit if you do make the move.