Hi Chris,
The engineer arrived ~1.30pm, spent ~20 minutes in the house doing a line test and then left the house to do more checks outside the house (presumably at the street cabinet), he didn't return until ~4pm! He made some changes outside the house, but didn't go in to any details. He did say that the maximum download speed (from his testing) would be 50-55mb/s. This conflicts with what the router has been syncing at (60-61mb/s), which doesn't decrease even during the dropouts. The engineer could not explain the router syncing at ~60mb/s given his test results. This also agrees with what the second engineer said (my download speeds were 8-10mb/s faster than any of my neighbours). I've looked at the router stats to see what the noise margin is and it shows 0 dB, which can't be correct (appears this is yet another bug in the router firmware!). The actual download rate (53430) is also higher than the maximum download rate (51867), which again is odd. The router is currently synced at 54mb/s and I have had no dropouts since ~4pm on Tuesday, but it's really too early to tell if the problem is fixed. If the router sync speed increases and the dropouts return I think something needs to be done to cap the download speed so that the line remains stable.
