A few weeks ago, I wrote about a mystery involving the telecommunications equipment providing the DSL line to my house. If you're reading this any time near when it was written, you have my eternal respect.
Since the first time my line retrained earlier on May 6th, just before I wrote the post, it has retrained nearly a hundred times. At the current rate, my line is retraining nearly 17 times per day. For the first week, it was just once every other day, at approximately mid-day, and I just presumed it had something to do with technicians opening up various pedestals, cross-boxes, and DSLAMs for the purpose of documenting or cleaning up wires. Ideally, preparing the neighborhood for a VDSL2 deployment.
This may or may not be happening, but in the time between then and now, my DSL signal levels on the upload side of things have become extremely low. As I write this, I am sitting at 6.0dB SNR, which is the lowest point my ISP's equipment is configured to hold a signal. If any errors happen on the line at all, it retains. This is unfortunate for me, because plenty of errors happen on the line.
Once I recognized this was the issue, and when the retrains became more frequent, I decided I wanted to use a modem with a few more troubleshooting feature. My current modem is "supported" but is old enough it doesn't have some of the neat-ish new things the Telco is doing with their firmware have not made it to this modem. Fortunately, I have two others. One is an ADSL2+ modem with 802.11N wireless networking, but only 10/100 Ethernet ports for LAN connections. It's a small device and it proved useful for troubleshooting, but because I'm using my LAN extensively these days, I did not want to compromise my ability to throw terabytes of data around between my desktops and the server. To this end, I used a slightly newer VDSL2 device, which I picked up from a retailer earlier in the year, just to have on hand.
Before explaining exactly why this didn't go the way I had planned, it's worth mentioning one of my biggest pet-peeves is when a device advertises functionality, has the functionality, but said functionality does not work. This is what I experienced earlier in the year with a Netgear DGN D3700 I had briefly, and part of the reason why I returned an otherwise stable device with good LAN performance, and significantly improved Wi-Fi performance over the Telco-provided equipment.
In theory, the newer VDSL2 device should be similar to my old one in functionality, but have the newer troubleshooting tools the ADSL2+ device has. Unfortunately, the way it works is because the VDSL2 devices are from manufacturer A, and the ADSL2+ device is from manufacturer Z, everything about them is totally different, right on down to the fact that the usage meter on this new device is not a usage meter (which would simply count how many megabytes came in and went out over the wire) at all, but rather, it is a speedometer. Its whole purpose was to inform you just how much of your slow connection you can't actually use. The other function I wanted was logging. The idea there being I wanted to know the date/time and ideally the speed at which the device retrained. Unfortunately, on this device, wireless associations were logged, but even though it actually experienced several retrains (I watched lights turning red on the physical status panel) the interface never acknowledged a retrain had occurred, happily believing for almost two days the connection was perfectly stable.
Fortunately, the ADSL2+ device is to the rescue. Even though port forwarding doesn't really work correctly on the ADSL2+ device, logging is perfect, and the traffic meter works halfway. It's sufficient for my troubleshooting until the Telco fixes the line and I can go back to using the original VDSL2 device, with its gigabit Ethernet ports.
It would be ideal if the Telco would release a gateway with working logging, gigabit Ethernet, 5GHz wireless (even if it was still 802.11N) and a usage meter correctly recording the amount of information transferred in both directions. It would be even better if the traffic meter recorded daily at 23:59:59 and total usage records in the system's log, and I would be all the way over the moon if the device could mail you the contents of the system log from the previous day at, say, 00:01:00. (This is the functionality advertised and documented in the manual for the DGN D3700, but did not work properly.) I would buy this new gateway immediately. Even better if it was also a bonded VDSL2 device with an Ethernet WAN port, just in case.
I still believe there may be an upgrade of the local area in the cards, and if it is happening, and the Telco would tell me about it, then I wouldn't bother too much, but I have since e-mailed their support group to find out what's going on. Ideally, they will be able to get it running properly without rolling a truck to my house and having a person look at the demarc and the street pedestal (to no avail) again. It would be ideal for me not to need to miss work.
This issue is going to become even more sensitive for me in the next few months, as my promotional discount for "you moved and the billing system thinks you are a new customer!" runs out, at which point I will be paying pretty close to $50/month for the line. It's honestly not a lot, but I would feel a lot less burned if I knew it was actually going toward monitoring, maintnenance, and upgrades for the local area.