Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

I am not complaining.

BTW, arse end of nowhere = 70km from London, 4Km from a town of 60,000 and 10Km from a town of 80,000.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

You miserable ass.

It's clearly not attempting to escalate anything, it's relaying a story. That, in case you were unaware, is what the media does for its audiences. Try some TV later, you might spot some.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

Checking your exchange there is Orbital/Vfast wireless service available in your area. I've never used them so they could be absolute crap for all I know.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

When dealing with BT, you generally need every weapon you can muster. There are some very good and helpful people at BT, but corporate policy sees to be to keep them hidden behind an impermeable barrier of off-shore fail.

As an aside, have you checked your connection speed in the test socket? When I did this, speeds doubled, and the Openreach folks came and replaced the entire master socket to give another little speed jump.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

If you're using a BT home hub 3 for wi-fi then you'll get a useful speed and reliability increase by either using another router or use another device (eg a time capsule) to provide the wi-fi part of your network, leaving the home hub just allocate addresses and be a modem.

The BT home hub 3 is a pretty lousy piece of kit.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

I helped out a friend with marginal connectivity by swapping out the home hobbled doorstop for an ex BT business 2-wire HGV2700. almost doubled his sync and now his line holds the connection for much longer. Very Cheap router on Fleabay.. but poison the update provisioning server.. the 6.3.x.x firmware was buggy the last I looked.

So if you have checked all your wiring (and made sure that the ring wire isn't connected on any extensions - the 2 wire would be a good (and cheap) next step - it works here in the wilds of Wales where the men are men and the BT based adsl is all 8 meg,

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

True, plus I'm sure I've seen more moans about Virgin media on this site than BT.

Of course BT are everywhere and Virgin aren't, so it's obvious more people in small communities will have problems. What is highly amusing is that it is the poshos in their big rural houses who suffer for a change instead of those in their terraced houses.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

I live in a similarly remote are in Belgium and I get close to the max advertised speed at any time of the day. I've lived in several different places around the country and always found it the same, from the days of 2Mbs to 30Mbs.

I find it hard to understand why UK broadband seems to be such a mess with such varying results even in big cities. Believe me the Belgian equivalent of BT is far from competent yet somehow still manages decent broadband in all the areas I've lived or had friends in.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

With a little digging online, you can find a Qwest (American ISP) firmware for the HGV2700 that runs more stable than the BT-stock and gives you US-strength wireless too. Be aware, though, that these 2-Wire units have a known issue (which I can confirm from personal experience) of failing to download single files of 2GB+ in size.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

"Orange France used to offer me 2mbit down and 256kbit up. A couple of months ago this was (artificially?) limited to 1.8mbit down, but the upload now runs closer to 700kbit.

"So, considering this, it sounds like BT should be ashamed of themselves...is the UK a third-world country or something?"

Orange gives me nominally 20Mbits/sec, in practice something between 12 and 15Mbits/sec, enough that I can routinely get Windows to report 12.5% usage on my 100meg Ethernet to the Livebox when downloading from a suitably positioned site. That is, I get more megaBYTEs per second than our reporter gets megaBITs per second.

Of course, I live in one of the inner burbs of Lille, about three quarters of a mile from the Eurostar station.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

I'd echo this and add that you may want to consider also disconnecting the 'bell wire' on any extension socket wiring that run from that master socket. It's unlikely that you have any phones elderly enough to have an issue with doing that. It can reduce interference enough to boost speeds a bit further (I believe that it it provided a little extra boost for ringing back when it was a real bell inside the phones).

The bell wire is normally the slot numbered 3 (orange with white trace); slots 2 (white with blue trace) and 5 (blue with white trace) are the ones that must be there to make a phone work.

If you're not happy with pulling bits of wire out plenty of places sell an adapter faceplate for the phone socket that has the same effect as disconnecting that one wire from your extensions.

Using the master socket for my ADSL router and disconnecting the bellwire tripled my speed to the heady heights of 3 meg!

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

Longmeister - you are the worst kind of pathetic dribbling IT twerp. The author is quite entitled to have a moan by any means available.

Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?

"I live in a similarly remote are in Belgium and.."

Roger that highground, you may TAKE THE SHOT..

http://zapatopi.net/belgium/

@dgharmon

"Remember, the claimed "up to 3Mbps" is for everyone connected to the same switch."

No. The advertised rates are the ATM line rate negotiated for your link to the hardware in your phone exchange (Multi-Service Access Node, MSAN).

Upstream from the MSAN, ISPs rent backhaul capacity from BT on a VPN link to their internal network, handing over at a Core Node. Physically, BT have to install enough backhaul capacity to handle the total rented capacity from all ISPs from that exchange, up to its parent exchange, and so on aggregating up to the Core Nodes.

Your download speeds from any given website depend thereafter on your ISPs peering capacity at Internet Exchange nodes, the capacity of those nodes, the website's ISP's peering capacity, and the amount of capacity that the website is renting from their ISP.

The article author's problem is that there is too much noise on his line, or devices multiplexing the line to multiple properties, meaning that the higher frequencies needed by ADSL are filtered off. Assuming that the problem is reproducible when all extension wiring is disconnected, he needs a new fully independent cable installed. However, I think BT's Universal Service Obligation only requires that a speed of 28.8 kbit/s is achievable for the Fundamental Internet Access requirement (last reviewed by Ofcom in 2006).

Re: That's the price you pay...

Totally agree. You'll be moaning about the cost of travelling to London by train next!

If you want better speeds try BE internet, they let you change the speed profile yourself.

Re: But...

So nobody else remember the "Shotgun" modems that Diamond used to do? Channel-bonding over PSTN - 100kb/sec.

(Although that said, he did say he had ISDN. If it was (almost certainly) ISDN2e, it would be 2x64kb, and channel-bonding was easy. Technically it wouldn't have been a modem though.)

Re: But...

ISDN doesn't use modems, it uses Terminal Adaptors.

Re: But...

"If your line^H^H^H^H shoddy national management culture of fail can't support a higher speed, it can't support it."

Fixed that for you.

Re: But...

Same old bollocks. In clock speeds, networking, and storage, K, M, G etc mean what they mean in every other context - SI powers of ten. Only in RAM / ROM chippery are K, M, and G used to mean Ki, Mi, Gi.

Re: But...

The other issue is that 56K modems only ever managed to reach speed that if you were within spitting distance of the exchange. Line lengths and db losses made just as much difference to them, too. I was our resident modem guy, so got to meet lots at various clients, and never saw one hit over 48K - most of the time they would train at 33.6, or less, and that was in an urban environment. I would imagine the OP would get a lot less.

(Here in inner-city Salford, ADSL wise, I got 5-6 Mbps a mile or so from the exchange. FTTC now gives me a slightly rocky 30Mbps... 100 yards or so from the cabinet as the crow flies, but apparently the 100 pair cable takes a meandering route around the estate before it gets as far as us.. )

I concur, need line stats to see why. Is router plugged into master socket, have you considered installing a replacement NTE5 faceplate with integrated filter, is internal wiring correct, yadda yadda.

My old man lives in the real middle of nowhere, 6km as crow flies from the exchange, initially he got 512k download synch, I replaced the faceplate and he now gets 3.5Mb, plenty enough for iplayer.

There are lots of reasons for getting slow broadband, but without the basic details you can't start to figure out why it's so slow. If he's 5km away by copper then he's at the very far reaches of DSL but the "up to 3Mb" quoted is important, the BT estimate for ADSL is conservative so he should be looking at maybe 4-5Mb which seems to suggest there is an issue somewhere along the line.

The only way to be sure of that is to know the attenuation and the SNR margin, it's basic troubleshooting stuff and is usually the first question asked when you're having speed problems. Then you need to go through a checklist.

First (obviously) place the modem into the test socket (behind the master socket) and check speeds, if speeds increase it's a problem on your side, if speeds don't increase, try a different filter, check speeds, try a different modem, check speeds. If the speeds don't change after that then the issue is with BT.

Do a quiet line test, dial 17070 and then press Option 2, if you hear anything on the line (snap, crackle or pop) then there is a line fault which is causing slow downs.

Or you can phone up BT who will just reset your line and hope for the best.

Going from BT to Plusnet would be like escaping from Wormwood Scrubs and taking sanctuary in Wandsworth.

It could be worse

he could have gone to orange, or whatever name they are now.

In which case without a long wait (as in long) he would get to talk to nobody.

In my case it was faster to connect via next doors btfone connection, as orange was frequently notable by its lack of anything...expensively lacking.

For anyone on BT Broadband who doesn't know, this costs 1.30, it's marketed as 'BT Broadband Accelerator', you can order it off their website, and the cost is added to your next bill.

If you're with another ISP over BT it's marketed as an iPlate and costs more.

I'd concur that you need stats, especially downstream attenuation and SNR margin (sometimes called nois margin). Ideally logged over a period of time.

Personally I would suspect either a line fault or a local source of noise. I recently suffered from a problem due to ingress of water into an underground joint (when my estate was built in the 1970s, they just buried the joints). It started out as intermittent issues and gradually got worse (audible as crackling on the line). During the final death throws, it caused so many disconnections the profile got fixed onto a 256kbps profile which did not automatically reset when the fault was cleared (involving diffing up the pavement. It required quite a lot of persistence to get through to a second level support team - generally call centre staff are just following scripts. It's the service providers job to chase this sort of stuff through (it's unclear if the service provider here is actually BT Retail or not, but all SPs should have the ability to get through to basic ADSL quality stats and reset DS profiles.

I'm about 3km from my local exchange (and the cable length is more like 3.5-4km) and get 6.5mbps on ADSL2+ with a 49db attenuation and 6db SNR margin. However, I've been very careful with internal wiring filtering at the faceplate and using twisted pair cable to get to the router/modem. Many people will get a lot worse at 49db attenuation.

Another place to look is the service providers users forums (assuming they have such a thing). Often there are SP reps and you tend to get more immediate attention from other users, who are often quite experienced. In an ideal world, SPs would have such skilled staff on the call centre. Unfortunately, with the pressure of getting costs down, this is rarely the case.