I already made a post in the Bell Direct forum even though I'm not ever sure they can help with Aliant stuff. I thought while I was waiting I'd copy/paste the discussion here in case some other customers have some knowledge of this black art that is the "downstream rate cap" and can fill me in. Please bear with me, here we go:
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Long story short I pay for 7Mbps DSL (High Speed Ultra) but I live about 4km away from the exchange. I understand that I will never be able to achieve 7Mbps.
When I look at the training history in my modem (screenshots attached) it looks like I should at least be able to get 3Mbps. There is a line on the diagnostics page that says "Downstream rate cap: 1600kbps" which leads me to believe that my connection has been limited to 1.5Mbps due to banding or something similar
My attenuation is really high, usually about 60db, but when I looked around a bunch of guides online said I should still be able to get ~3Mbps even with it that high.
I'm really at a loss here - I've called several times but no one has been able to help me out. They always want to send a technician to my house but one was here a while ago and said there were no line problems it was just that I'm far from the exchange. That said, now that I have my own modem and can see this diagnostic information I want to know why there is a "downstream rate cap" on my account. Is my account provisioned correctly? Can someone reset the rate cap so it can re-train to 3000 instead of 1600 (since usually my "max connection" is closer to 4000, you can see that in the screenshots).
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So yeah, anyone have any ideas that might help me out? Thanks in advance!