Zen Internet Support Forum

I have been running a Thomson 585v7 router for about 4 and a half days now. In the DSL details section I appear to have an extremely high number of FEC errors (just over 6.5 million and counting).

Any ideas what would be causing these?

I set the router up as instructed on the Zen KB. The router is connected to my Mac (PowerMacG5 running Mac OS X 10.5.3) using the wireless connection.

As far as I'm aware all the router settings for the DSL connection are the default ones. 

FEC errors mean that interleaving is enabled on your line and that it is doing its job, basically an FEC error means that any bad/corrupted data on it ways to you has been fixed at your end thus negating the need to re-transmit the info, by the looks of it if it was'nt enabled on your line then every single one of your downloads would end up corrupted or would take much longer to download.

You could maybe try rebooting your router to see if the number of errors lowers, as I had that happen to me ages ago when interleaving got enabled on my line for no reason, I got millions of errors/fixes and I rebooted the router and it settled down to a few hundred.

Also, interleaving gets enabled on lines that are having problems, or if you didnt specify that you wanted it turned off when you signed up with zen then I think its enabled automatically ? but since you are getting millions of errors/fixes then maybe you should call Zen to see if there is any type of fault in your line, especially if this just happened out of the blue.

Bottom line is, since you have interleaving enabled on your line then those FEC ( Forward Error Correction ) errors/fixes are absolutely nothing to worry about aslong as you dont have any other problems related to your internet connection.

Thanks for the information.

I've rebooted the router (and doesn't that take a long time compared to my old Netgear).

I checked on the customer portal and interleaving is set to Auto and is enabled. Will Technical support turn it off if I ask them to?

I think its probably wise to have it enabled on your line, especially if your getting 6 million plus errors.

What you could do is call them and ask if there is any faults or work being done on your line, as that may of caused the faults and for interleaving to automatically enable itself, I wouldnt call and ask them to turn interleaving off or your internet will suffer from corrupt downloads, packetloss and various other problems, the interleaving is there to help you and your line obviously needs it, but as I say, it could just be a temporary thing especially if you have or had a fault on your line.

Call them and ask them to do a line check and take it from there.