Other Line Options

Line Rate

This shows your line rate:

Line rate as shown on the control pages: 39.8M - Good!

This one has a rate of: 338K - Something is Wrong!

Changing the Line Rate

This sets the line rate on your line:
This change is applied the next time you connect (Re-PPP).

Line Options:

At 100%, the LNS throttles you to exactly your line's capacity.

At 110%, it will let through 110% of your line's capacity, and allow the wholesaler's system to buffer or drop the excess.

At 95%, it lets through 95% of your line's capacity, so it will be unaffected by the wholesaler's buffering. Setting to less than 100% is advised for lines running VoIP and other real-time services as it means the downlink won't be filled. Lowering the rate from 100% to 95% will mean that there should be no network buffering within the wholesaler's network - and may well reduce latency when downloading at the full rate of the line.

Example:

Changing the rate from 100% to 95% reduces average latency when filling the downlink.

Stability Options

Available on BT 21CN ADSL

These stability options refer to how aggressive BT's DLM is when monitoring and managing the line.

Usually we would suggest keeping it on Normal (the default). Using increased stability options increases DLM sensitivity, so can have the side effect of making your line sync at lower speeds.

Other Line Options

Most of these options are available on all lines:

MTU

Forces an MTU regardless of what is negotiated by your router.

More Info: MTU is negotiated upon connection. We usually like 1500 MTU, however, there can be situations where forcing 1492 MTU is required. For example, if your router negotiated 1500 MTU initially but you make a connection to a server that wants to re-negotiate a lower MTU it will try to do this using ICMP, but if your router has a misconfigured firewall that blocks ICMP this can't be renegotiated and the connection to the server will have problems. This is seen when connecting to certain web sites, bank web sites and https sites. Forcing 1492 MTU from the start means that all your traffic is in packets of 1492 bytes and so won't have this problem.

TCPFix

Modifies the MSS in TCP packets so that it does not exceed the MRU.

MRUFix

When sending IP traffic, ignore the MRU we receive during PPP negotiation. This can save a LCP re-negotiation, which has been known to help OpenBSD based PPP.

LCPFix

Re-negotiates PPP after acquiring the connection from BT, who may provide 1500 MTU when it should be 1492 MTU.

More Info: During the PPP connection when your router initially syncs up and logs in to us, the PPP connection is passed via BT. Sometimes BT can change the MTU. With this option we will accept the PPP connection from BT, but will then renegotiate the PPP connection with your router allowing the MTU to be reduced. On TalkTalk connections the MTU is always negotiated as 1492 MTU, you will need to select LCPFix and 1500 MTU to fix this, otherwise the LNS will use 1492 MTU when renegotiating. This is sometimes called 'LCP re-negotiation always'

FastTimeout

Uses an LCP Echo timeout of 10 seconds rather than 60 seconds before entering the LostCarrier state.

More Info: LCP echoes usually stop responding if the line has gone down. Our LCP monitoring, which produces the graphs, will drop the line if there are no replies after 60 seconds. When bonding or used in a fall-back setup, having a faster timeout is useful in order to fall-back quicker.

LNS reset

From time to time there are upgrades to the LNSs. This is usually to add new features, or fix bugs.

Upgrading an LNS is very quick, and it is only off line for under a second. However, it does mean stopping all of the sessions on the LNS, which means we will force your DSL service to reconnect. You can set the preferred time for the reconnect to happen, the default is 1AM.

Accessing This Feature

Access is via the Control Pages as follows:

Log in to the Control Pages with your xxx@a login
Click on the line you want to view
Click on your login (e.g. abc@a)}
Set the 'LNS reset'. You can choose a time between 1AM and 6AM

We have more info here: LNS Switches