A method for copper lines classification

Recently many end users show attention on the quality of Internet access; in Italy, a national wide measure campaign, sponsored by Italian Communication Regulatory Authority, allows user to evaluate his bandwidth using a licit software. In this context a primary end user need is to have the possibility to measure its bandwidth and to compare it with the parameters declared by ISPs. Assuming the availability of a standard recognized methodology to measure bandwidth on user access link, a problem with this approach arises when the measured performances are lower than the declared quality of service. When this happens, the problem could depend on several factors not directly attributable to the ISP. In this work, we propose a solution by which it is possible to characterize a physical line. The idea is to detect the situations in which the performances are degraded due to an unsatisfactory physical line state. To make this detection some real cases are considerate.