"Bt Broadband are a shower of cranberries"

Vortex808 wrote:
Does anyone have any ideas? Or is this all we're getting now? The line seems fine, so it should surely be at 3.5 Mbps+ again. Unless sky have done something odd and capped us. Think it may be time to change.

Was thinking about going back to BT, but it sounds like that's not a great idea!

If your line has been moved to a new pair because of a fault there's no guarantee that it's taking the same route back to the exchange. If the new pair takes a longer route then your speed will be slower. Or it could simply be a worse pair; the engineer will have had to use whatever was free in the cabinet.

You can get a rough guide to the cable distance between you and the exchange by looking at the downstream attenuation figure reported by your router. It's roughly 10db for every kilometre. As the crow flies I'm only 3.4km from the exchange but my attenuation of 56b means there's over 5 kilometres of cable run. If you can't get your downstream attenuation figure but know the straight line distance multiply that by 1.5 for a rough estimate.

Bremenacht wrote:
I think it can take a few days for the exchange equipment (DSLAM?) to 'notice' that your line quality is better and push the limit back up.

Yep, if you're on BT provisioned ADSL then your line will be profiled according to your connection rate when the system thinks your line is stable at that speed. So for example, if you had a sync of 1152kbps BT would profile your line as a 1Mbps connection; sort out your internal wiring and get a sync of 3424kbps it would give you a 3Mbps profile but not straight away. Could be 3-5 days before the throughput actually changes. The bigger the jump the quicker BT will re-profile the line.

LLU providers don't tend to use profiles so if you connect at 3424kbps for example you get much closer to the full connection rate (in an ideal situation). They also tend to use ADSL2/2+ which squeezes a bit more out of your line; ADSL1 is still what BT use in the main though they are speeding up the ADSL2+ rollout.

Edited by JetSetWilly at 20:33:18 04-11-2009

triarii wrote:

Smuggo wrote:

Yes. If the ring wire is connected it can cause interference to the broadband signal, the more ring wires in your house the more it affects the signal. At least, that's what I've been told (by a BT engineer). Actually, this is his website, it might help...

www.broadbandadvice.org.uk

Cheers mate. Removed the ring wire, increased my down speed from 3.5MB to 4.4MB and up speed from 0.7 to 0.9 :)

Amazing something so simple can make such a big difference.

@JetSetWilly the route should be exactly the same. They dug right up our drive- only re-tarred 2 years ago :-( and have connected it to where the line came up before. The only difference is that he's run it through the garage and into the side of the house by the phone socket instead of coming up under the house. I don't think that would have made too much of a difference.

My downstream line attenuation appears to be 27db, which would probably be about right as we're only a mile or so away from the exchange.

Edited by Vortex808 at 22:21:10 04-11-2009

Yeah, but theres still a chance they might have changed your routing. I work on the network all the time. It surprises me anyone has broadband at all to be honest. As soon as fibre to the cab goes live, everyone will be happy.

Smuggo wrote:

Make sure you remove the ring wires of all the sockets in the house. I had 9 in my house (including a 2nd master socket), supposedly you're only meant to have 3-4, but they all count.

Yeah, there's an extension socket behind my desk but it's hard to get to without moving the whole desk so I'll do that one tomorrow.

The only terminals that need a wire on are 2 & 5. If there's a wire connected to any of the others, not just terminal 3, pull (don't cut!) it off.

Vortex808 wrote:
@JetSetWilly the route should be exactly the same. They dug right up our drive- only re-tarred 2 years ago :-( and have connected it to where the line came up before. The only difference is that he's run it through the garage and into the side of the house by the phone socket instead of coming up under the house. I don't think that would have made too much of a difference.

My downstream line attenuation appears to be 27db, which would probably be about right as we're only a mile or so away from the exchange.

If my attenuation was that low I'd be over the moon. You should be getting much much better speeds out of your line than that.

I really must sort mine out. Last time I tried though I knackered my connection entirely! I'll have a look at that advice website one day and really put my mind to it

It's worth checking out whether you are part of the initial fibre to the cabinet plans next year, as this will definitely help with issues you may be having with slow speeds

http://www.btplc.com/news/articles/showarticle.cfm?articl...



Edited by BaggyAnt at 07:54:36 05-11-2009

Jetset_UK wrote:
Yeah, but theres still a chance they might have changed your routing. I work on the network all the time. It surprises me anyone has broadband at all to be honest. As soon as fibre to the cab goes live, everyone will be happy.

Yeah but there is always going to be some that won't be fibred up, or are still a way frm the cabinet. Can't please all the people all the time though

malteaserhead wrote:
I am happy with the service I got from BT. I think in about 6 years with them it's been down for one day. For once I seem to be the lucky sod technology wise!
/watches everything else burst into flames

It will have been down for far, far more than that believe me, you just haven't noticed. :)

Edited by silentbob at 08:56:49 05-11-2009

Ah, but if your broadband goes down and you're not surfing for porn, does it ... erm... make a sound?
/thinks again

I'm sure you're right about the downtime levels. I'm not over the moon with BT, it is pricey (they almost have a monopoly over here, no cable providers etc) and it's not fast but it has worked most of the time when I wanted it.

JetSetWilly wrote:
LLU providers don't tend to use profiles so if you connect at 3424kbps for example you get much closer to the full connection rate (in an ideal situation). They also tend to use ADSL2/2+ which squeezes a bit more out of your line; ADSL1 is still what BT use in the main though they are speeding up the ADSL2+ rollout.

We just shifted our ADSL supplier at work, and I regraded my line to an unbundled Tiscali LLU product supporting ADSL2+ - I can confirm that this is correct.

Further more, I cannot emphasise enough the importance of using your BT master socket's faceplate test socket to diagnose potential noisy bell loop problems. If your master socket is an NTE5 style unit, unscrew the faceplate and disconnect to expose the test socket. Plug in your filter and your router, restart it and check your ATM stats / DSL information.

The above meant that my negotiated speed over ADSL2+ went from 755 (7.5Mb) to 1150 (11.1Mb) - a huge difference. You can then either (as JSW has stated) disconnect the bell loop from your master socket OR you can buy what's known as an iPlate which properly terminates the ring / bell loop AND performs yet more clever filtering to improve signal quality.

I just realised that this might already all have been posted. :)

Edited by silentbob at 09:13:19 05-11-2009

Ta for the info all the same. Time to investigate. Our lines are as noisy as fook.

Yeah, it has been posted but not in as much detail! I just have extension sockets, no master from what I can work out. Irritating.

My iPlate is on the way so I'll post back how well it seems to work.

Mine and my girlfriends BT broadband both went down last night, and after I praised their reliability haha. It was weird, I could get on EG but not any BBC sites.

dither wrote:
Mine and my girlfriends BT broadband both went down last night, and after I praised their reliability haha. It was weird, I could get on EG but not any BBC sites.

thats called a DNS error, usually resetting the router will fix it.

Yeah but hers went down too, and she lives 60 miles away. I reset the router and it was still playing up. Must've been on BTs end.

A DNS error isn't local to you, it affects everyone using that DNS server wherever they are geographically.

Most routers let you re-establish the PPP connection (and thereby refresh the DNS info) without doing a full reboot.

Dougs wrote:
Yeah, it has been posted but not in as much detail! I just have extension sockets, no master from what I can work out. Irritating.

I thought this too. Old master sockets look just the same as all the others. You need to unscrew all your sockets, the one that has a big transistor thing on it is the master socket. Like the top photo in this link;

http://broadbandadvice.org.uk/Ring%20wires/Photos%20to%20...

Cheers, I think that's the one in the bedroom (which is the one I thought). Anyway, just disconnected all wires other than 2&5 in 2 of my sockets (can't get to another extension behind the telly), speed jumped from 2.7Mbps to 5.6Mbps. \o/

Bastard Telecom ! I left them for being shite too. homehub is a shower of shit. Those stupid piece of crap phones never ever worked. Also BT vision always broke down, had to be rebooted all the fucking time. Wont be going back to them, thats 4shaw. ...... If you have problems reading this or understanding what im saying... Just turn your router off and leave it for 30 seconds, and turn it back on, if you still cant read this then its tough shit and we will continue to dry hump your bank account every month for a "sevice" that is utter rubbish. ;)

Cheers Spectral, you had it bang on. Phoned Sky tonight after BT came back to check the problem with the extension and it had indeed been capped at 2Mb. After getting it sorted I am now reveling in the speed of 16 Mb down, 1 Mb up. Hopefully it'll stay at that!

Have yourself a virtual pint, you've earned it! Cheers!

So what's that "BT Accelerator" about then?

I've been thinking of switching from Virgin to one of the BT-based BB providers but that fact they advertise 20MB like it's their max speed worries me.

I get a constant 18-20MB wireless speed right now and even that feels slow!

Anybody any idea why I can't play some games online at peak hours (6pm-11pm)? On Tiscali.

Others are fine, and PSN itself is fine. It really annoying me & I've no idea why it's happening.

:(

What happens? And what games?

Dougs wrote:
Cheers, I think that's the one in the bedroom (which is the one I thought). Anyway, just disconnected all wires other than 2&5 in 2 of my sockets (can't get to another extension behind the telly), speed jumped from 2.7Mbps to 5.6Mbps. \o/

That's a bloody good result Dougs and no mistake!

/jealous