Another speed / disconnection issues thread

Question

Hi all,
I'm getting quite frustrated with getting a problem on my line fixed, that's affecting both broadband and telephone service. This has been going on (on and off) since summer last year.
Using a BT Homehub 2, the connection started dropping quite frequently, and a noise appeared on the phone line - bad enough that I couldn't use it for calls as I couldn't hear what the other person was saying. After multiple telephone engineer visits (about 5 different engineers - it was an intermittent fault, so difficult to trace I believe) they narrowed it down to a section of overhead cable that was rubbing against a tree branch. It took a complaint to BT to actually get this section of cable replaced though. This takes us up to around November last year.
Since then we had a couple of months of reasonably stable service (the noise had all but disappeared and broadband was connected at a regular 2.5mbps). However recently the noise has returned on the phone line and the broadband issues have also come back (regular disconnects and low speed). Some days it disconnects every 10 minutes for a few hours, and some days maybe 5 times in the whole day.
The BT broadband technical support line ran a line test about a week ago and decided they needed to escalate the issue to a Level 2 team (whatever that means). They ran more tests and, following their script, decided that my Homehub was at fault. I didn't agree, but decided to humour them. I have a spare ADSL router, and have swapped the BT homehub out for that, with no resulting difference in connection speed or stability.
I'm currently connected at 576kbps. The ADSL router is connected directly to the test socket, and has been for the last 2 weeks. I have also tried swapping filters. Still no improvement. I called technical support this morning again for an update, and they decided that they wanted to try resetting my IP profile. When I asked them what this would achieve they said that it would fix my speed issue, my disconnection issue, and the noise on my telephone line.
Now this sounds a little bit ambitious to me - I don't see how a simple IP profile reset can fix all these issues, but I'm not a technical expert and so I'm coming to you for advice. Does this sound like a reasonable course of action to you? My view is that there is still a fault somewhere on the line or in the exchange, but they are currently refusing to send out an engineer to run tests from this end, and are telling me I need to wait up to 4 days for the IP profile reset to take effect before they will consider sending one out.
Sorry for the long post - any help or advice much appreciated. Here's some noise stats from the router (not a BT one at the moment, but as I said, it doesn't seem to make any difference which router I use).
Downstream
Upstream
Line Coding(Trellis):
On
On
SNR Margin (0.1 dB):
74
150
Attenuation (0.1 dB):
515
245
Output Power (0.1 dBm):
166
123
Attainable Rate (Kbps):
736
908

Answer 1

Thanks for the quick reply.
I have re-connected the Homehub to the test socket now. The downstream rate seems to have gone way up (this is the first time I've seen a rate this high since I first connected the Homehub to the test socket about two weeks ago). Just goes to show how much speed the connection loses when using internal wiring - as I said, I used to get about 2.5mbps - but that's a different issue.
My disconnection / speed issue is frustratingly intermittent, as swapping between the two different routers hasn't made any difference over the last week, with downstream rates of 1mbps or less, but now that you've asked me to do it, typically it now looks much better. Going on my past experience though it won't hold this rate for very long.
Connection information
Line state
Connected
Connection time
0 days, 0:00:40
Downstream
6,176 Kbps
Upstream
448 Kbps
ADSL settings
VPI/VCI
0/38
Type
PPPoA
Modulation
ITU-T G.992.1
Latency type
Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up)
9.0 dB / 18.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up)
42.0 dB / 24.0 dB
Output power (Down/Up)
19.8 dBm / 12.1 dBm
Loss of Framing (Local)
36
Loss of Signal (Local)
54
Loss of Power (Local)
0
FEC Errors (Down/Up)
0 / 0
CRC Errors (Down/Up)
0 / N/A
HEC Errors (Down/Up)
N/A / 0
Error Seconds (Local)
22