We have been having problems with our Internet link, and a noisy phone line for a little bit of time.

Fortunately we use a ADSL router - which gives us s lot of diagnostic information, and sure enough it was not good :

(Click for larger)

The key is the S/N ratio - and the linespeed.

ADSL is a adaptive protocol, and the speed will vary according to how good your link is, and ours was quite bad.

The first key was to go around the house and disconnect phones, and the S/N ratio went up to 6. The I found the main telephone box

and connected a phone to the test socket. It was clear - and not noisy. So I started cleaning contacts around the house, and the S/N ratio is no in excess of 10, which is enough to reduce the number of errors on the line, and increase the speed to it's maximum, which is 8,192 Mbit/s (download speed). So now all is well.

The other tool I found - which is excellent when used with one of the more popular ADSL router is DMT, and it does a really thorough job of displaying the internal data from the router :

(NB! the link I've given for DMT is not for the original site - as this seems to be down a lot, but for a alternative site that also hosts a Linux version of the tool)

(Click for larger)

This screenshot is after I managed to reduce the noise on the line.

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