Lebara - anyone use them?

Your wiring is being nibbled by @SuePJ’s deer…

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Quite possibly

I thought the point of WiFi is not dear?
Ok I’ll get my coat :blush:

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The cables are deerly beloved…

Internet now in “YoYo” mode, spending more time “resyncing” than doing useful work.

Plan “B” active :slight_smile:

And let the devil take the hind-most

Have a look at Prixtel - SFR network.

They do “variable” no contract packages. The more you use the more they charge. There’s 3 or 4 packages. On introductory offer their small data package was very competitive

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Thanks, just had a look.

The pricing is interesting, though not completely flexible as you have to pick the right package for your ball park usage and getting the completely optimal package might be difficult (eg if you never go above 40G, which is probably most people to be fair, then the “petit” package is cheapest. If, however, you regularly use between 40 and 50G the 90G package is cheaper (though that seems to be a special offer).

No it has it’s limits - it’s no contract so you’re not stuck

So, had a nice webchat with “Harry” on Tuesday evening, not an especially plausible French name - while it does make it into the the top 500 it sits precariously at No 489, but he seemed willing enough to help.

I could not persuade him that the fact that the internet has suddenly become wobbly but much more so when it rained suggested (to me, anyway) that water was getting into the wiring somewhere and he had to follow his script and “put a stabiliser on the line” - i.e cap the speed so much that there remains enough margin to keep going and not reconnect all the time.

I don’t know how much data he will have to look at when we resume the webchat tomorrow morning but I thought I’d do a little logging of the line parameters and speeds myself, so as to have some ammo - for the geeks out there with a Livebox 2, 3, or 4 sysbus is a handy tool that will extract all sorts of useful info for you.

Can anyone spot when it has been raining chex moi?

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I saw speed & connection issues to with Giffgaff/Orange when it rained, and wondered if it might be the effects of water interfering with wireless transmission? I’ve worked in places with a microwave transmitter/receiver in the past, and used to lose the internet completely when it rained.

Microwave links can certainly be affected by rain, after all microwave ovens use the fact that water absorbs microwaves to cause heating.

Given that it’s VDSL over copper I still suspect water ingress - there’s a lot going on in the above graph but the downstream attenuation goes up when it rains. As that’s a physical characteristic of the line itself and not influenced by outside interference it should stay fairly constant, going up when it rains suggests things are getting damp and forming a low resistance path which is bleeding signal away.

Interestingly you can see the difference between the night-time and day-time noise margins for the periods where the line is well behaved can be seen (the first portion of the graph up to about 30,000 seconds from the start and again between about 100,000 seconds and 130,000 seconds - overhead DSL lines are often noisier at night as they pick up more MW and SW radio stations.

I note that after the onset of tonight’s rain the system only resynchronised (the vertical blue lines where the speed drops to zero) a couple of times before dropping the speed to 28Mbps - at which it can hang on even though the signal to noise margin is varying by up to 10dB reading to reading (when “well behaved” it varies by lesss than 1dB). So I’m uncomfortable that Orange will declare the line “stable” at that and leave the speed there - not really acceptable when norrmally I get 70+Mbp/s

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Ah, I’d made the assumption because it was the Lebara thread that you were working wirelessly. Yes, in that case it’s likely water ingress as you say.

sorry, it was just that this was the thread I’d had a moan about the dire state of my Internet connection.

It’s back to trying (and failing) to maintain around 36 Mbps, I’ve gone back to the Popit SIM for now - will update the graph with this morning’s data once I’ve had some breakfast.

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About to tackle Orange again - it went completely pear-shaped overnight. In two days something like 94 disconnections and resynchronisations despite the “stabiliser”.

I can’t like that - wishing you success with the call.

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No appology required, you put up with all, (most ) of ours :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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It went as well as expected - wasn’t able to show him the graph, as expected he claimed lack of internet access - well, maybe or I could believe there’s a policy in place about not following links from clients.

He claimed that the line hadn’t disconnected yesterday which isn’t exactly true - but I only needed to say “well, there have been 94 disconnections and resynchronisations since we last spoke” and he just said “needs an engineer”. I could have told him that on Tuesday but never mind.

Scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

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Oh, and negotiations all in French - OK a bit of cheating with Google translate to check I wasn’t talking complete gibberish and there was a point I accidentally cut and pasted the English sentence and not the French.

But, once again, I’m left thinking “how do people cope without any French?”. OK, yes - bubbles, minimal interaction with officialdom, spouse does all the talking in forrin’ languages etc. Can’t be much fun.

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I suppose it was a bit too much to expect that anyone would turn up.

Orange charge 69€ if you are not at home - I wonder if the recompense for a wasted afternoon is the same?

Apparently they didn’t arrive because it needs a multi-person team and equipment (probably a cherry picker) so has been rescheduled for 7th June.

Not that they bothered letting me know, or updating the “dossier” on the fault - so I could have got much more done this afternoon. I’ve tried not to get too “stuck into” anything in case I missed a call or the doorbell.

Oh well.