Frequent disconnections are usually the result of noise. Drayteks, for some reason, based on my personal experience, are more susceptible to noise disconnections than other routers. On my line, we have SHINE, which meant that it's difficult to identify as it only happens when someone switches on/off an appliance in our neighbourhood. So, every morning, at 12:57am, our line would drop. This has now stopped, which I believe it's linked to a timer (more specifically boiler), but started at other times. This makes me believe that someone in neighbourhood has a serious problem with their electrical system, or that there are a number of appliances at different places that cause the issue, or that someone's Tel line runs parallel to an electrical cable and everything just 'jumps' on the Tel. line.

Openreach are not formally required to address the issue of noise, regardless of whether Shine or Rein - it says so in their terms and conditions of service - and they rarely do. This is even when you write a CEO complaint. In my case, it was only after I submitted a data request that I officially found out that there was shine (although I had suspected it) and that they only tried *once* to locate it with 'top of the range spectrum analyser'. They're a bunch of charlatans and if you want to tackle them, be prepared for a long and tiring effort (in my case it was 20+ engineers and 2 CEO complaints, one of which was rejected, before anything happened. Even then, if you're not versed in DSL, they'll do whatever to avoid responsibility; by the way, I've never met so many charming engineers: sweet as anything and rarely telling the truth).

The problem with noise on the line isn't about trying to fix it, but trying to locate it. It's a very costly operation and even less successful if there's suspected SHINE. On top of everything, Openreach don't actively undertake such tasks because they have very few REIN engineers. For example, there was only one in my area, which covered central Scotland: a very smart and pleasant young chap that knows his business and is very much in demand.

I also think your implication that the noise cwas caused by the installation of fttp is questionable, unless you have a direct proof of that. It could just be, as is in many cases, a coincidence that noises started then, too, although it could also be that they damaged something while installing the new infrastructure on the same poles. If the latter, their equipment is smart enough to give them the location of the fault, but it takes time to fix it, though a decade is long enough.

Another thing to remember is that your line is described as being within parameters. That doesn't mean perfect; on the contrary, it means that it'll have an issue but is deemed to be sufficiently operational to provide you with the necessary service. You won't be able to challenge that, as, again, it's within openreach's t & s to isp's.

My background isn't telecoms so I've had to learn as I went along. I did make mistakes, especially when dealing with Openreach, but also learnt from making them (for example, you can't complain to Openreach about a service, which is why our first CEO complaint was rejected, but an individual, so the only way with them was to get a ridiculous number of engineers out who couldn't fix the issue to then complain about their patch lead. That takes time, though, and was risky because of our work - service had to be disconnected for half a day to investigate *each time* - and because of COVID; plus, each engineer thought they'd be the one to address the issue with our line, so each performed tests, swapped master sockets, blamed our router, phoned their boss to investigate, went to speak to someone etc etc; worst of all: each had to be told the same story about our disconnections, symptoms etc every bloody time they were here).

For some reason interleave never came on on our line. I think it has to do with settings at the cabinet, especially if you're on a huawai one. Sone isp's say that getting up to 3 disconnections per 24 hours is acceptable, and that they won't do anything unless this is exceeded. So, on my line, we had more than 3 disconnections a day, noise, frequent fluctuations in SNR, and interleave *never* came on. In fact, I was trying to force it as some point by restarting my router 20+ times and the bloody thing still never came on. I desperately needed it because, because of disconnections, I was unable to work during the pandemic. What helped instead was increasing SNR: I didn't mind losing an amount of speed at the gain of stability.

Getting compensation from your ISP is another issue, and I'm currently battling that. It's because Openreach in the first year of our problems (it went over two years, by the way) kept on shutting down each job, which meant that every single one was treated as a separate issue. Because of that, you won't be entitled to compensation for the length of time the service was not up to the standard, but the the days it was down. Proving that it was the same fault is very difficult - because Openreach are very smart - but I'm getting there (thanks to statutory data processing requests...)

You're quite right, it is possible that the noise at the same time as FTTC could be coincidence. However, given the long time with no audible noise on the line and pretty much the moment FTTC was installed, we've had awful noise ever since... I'd say more than half the telephone calls made have noise on them, even when I'm talking with PlusNet, so they can hear what I'm talking about, while we're talking.

I have given up on the noise being sorted until we get FTTP. Funnily enough, I had to re-negotiate my contract with PlusNet a couple of weeks ago and I had a hard time persuading the person on the phone not to book an engineer. Having the engineer report on the record seems to have helped knock a few quid off the price every time.

I've got about eight or nine different firmware varieties to try now. The latest seems to have been up for 21.5 hours so is the best performer so far. I'll get there.

I was fortunate because at the time I'd been working on a telephony project at work, so had struck up a conversation with a number of engineers. Good people for the most part, just like you observed, but not likely to tell the whole truth because they're in a difficult position themselves. Roll on FTTP, eventually.