[Closed] ADSL broadband question

From your telephone exchange, you're right: the copper wire is owned by BT and it's how your ISP's broadband signal gets to you.

Problems (in terms of poor connections, dropouts, slow speeds, etc) can be caused by (1) factors in your home (2) factors outside your home (3) the "last mile" from the exchange (you live miles from the exchange, the joints are dodgy, it's raining, etc) or (4) your ISP's network running slow/having an outage.

ISPs spend a lot of money to improve their network performance, but there are so many factors that it's sometimes hard to work out what the cause may be!

Look up your exchange at samknows.com. The LLU providers listed use their own kit rather than BT's.

Won't fix a wiring problem, but may avoid contention related issues.

Question is, do you know where the problem is? Most often IME it's home cabling. Plug into the test socket (google it) and see if anything improves.

most of my issues over the years have been between the exchange and the house (BT's bit) BT seem overly slow/unable to fix the issues for the other ISP's but switching to BT gets the stuff sorted. Not suggesting a conspiracy there just my practical solution to getting it working. The last one was a combination of inside/outside, once we disconnected all the other (9) sockets we got a much better signal but now have wires all over the place. The outside line is still shakey and drops out once a week but they wont replace that.

Done the test socket, disconnect everything else thing and it makes no difference. I can get 6.6Mb at certain times of day (e.g. early morning) but it falls to less than 330Kb in the evenings. Sounds like contention somewhere and that's why I was wondering if it was likely to be an ISP or an infrastructure problem.

If you can log on to your router it should be able to tell you the ADSL sync speed (e.g. mine currently says about 12Mbps), which tells you a lot about the performance of the piece of wire between your house and the exchange. If the throughput you're getting is significantly less than the sync speed suggests (you lose some in overheads) then your provider is probably throttling it in their network, either deliberately or through contention/lack of capacity, in which case changing your provider may or may not help. My throughput currently says 3Mbps according to speedtest.net but it goes up to about 8-10Mbps at quiet times.

It's also worth checking everything you can at home - thermostats, emersion heater, lighting, wsshing machine, etc. Then check the router. After all that, log a fault with the isp.

Be aware, though, that if they recommend an engineer visit, you may (if the fault is in your home only) be liable to a charge (50 quid IIRC).

Ask for a [url= http://www.1computercare.co.uk/blog/index.php/2007/11/27/what_is_a_woosh_test?blog=5 ]whoosh test[/url]. I've never full understood them, but love asking for them as it sounds 'cool' 😉

Seriously though, they can help as they can point towards a problem if you have already tried the Master socket thing etc, but it sounds more like you have a contention issue and seeing if any ISP has unbundled your exchange and swapping to them may help (as per Cougars comment above)

Considered fibre, incidentally?

Sounds kind of like contention to me as well.
/Have you tried turning it off and on again?/

I can see perceived speed drops once the schools get out - fine during day - work from home on residential street - then it seemed to go much slower after 4pm say. Of course within the house is a factor too - two teenage children, several connected devices operating over the home network - the contention might easily be within the house.

I suspect (could be wrong) that fibre isn't an option for the OP..

Does contention vary between ISPs? I guess it does as I used to pay more to get better contention ratios..

FWIW I just ran a couple of gash tests. ~2MB/s download, 124kB/s upload. Another one says 19 Mb/s, 1.1 Mb/s.. Could be other stuff running of course. Exchange is about 300 yards away..

Does indeed sound like contention on the ISPs infrastructure, given these days you can do 1 month contracts I'd try switching to Zen to see if it improves (they're expensive though so may not be a long term solution but at least will give you an answer).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but contention won't affect the sync speed, surely? You'd still connect at 6mbps but you'd get a slower speed reported on a speed test.

Also afaik the sync speed doesn't change unless the line drops and reconnects, so something is affecting the line itself.

We just had endless problems with poor upstream sync, worse when it was raining.. but it seems to have fixed itself for now.. touch wood. Still drops when someone calls though.

My previous ISP

[img] [/img]

Around the time I thought I'd try someone else as they also had a download limit plus 6mb is pretty bad for ADSL2+

My new ISP

[img] [/img]

So yes there could be a difference and BT never throttle.

That could be different kit at that exchange. That can make a difference.

Whatever it is changing ISP worked.

sounds to me like everyone in your areas logged in at night 😉

by the way - welcome to the sticks , probably best get used to it.

Considered fibre, incidentally?

you are aware he doesnt live in deepest englandshire right ? - ill be surprised if he can get fibre given i live on the edge of aberdeen and cant get it , comparitively he lives in a wooden shack in the woods

my experiance is the same as mikeWsmiths with the BT - bt will fix shit quick if you moan hard enough - when i was with other ISPs they just blamed it on BT but nothing ever got done. got fed up chasing - bt might be twice the price but at least i get reliable internet.

Whatever it is changing ISP worked.

Right.. so you need to find out if a) different ISPs use different kit in your exchange, and b) the problem will actually be fixed by different kit or different ADSL protocols.

Many ISPs share BT's kit so changing ISPs results in no technical changes whatsoever, just a different letterhead on the bill.

Thanks for the suggestions folks. I've just signed up with Sky and it's them I'm having the problem with. It's been less than 2 weeks but more than the 10 day "tuning" period. I think my only other options are BT and PlusNet so I guess I will have to get on to them all to see if any of them might be able to do better.

Sky should be LLU unless you're on their "Connect" service which is BT Wholesale, so you're already on different kit at the exchange.

If its anything like when i was on o2 via bt wholesale you really are bottom of the pile when it comes to bandwidth.

My experiance was at busy time - 0.2 meg

Change to paying bt direct - same huse , same line ....nominal 5mb service the whole time

Most folk wouldnt notice but signing into work over vpn and it would always drop when connection went below a meg

[quote=Cougar ]Sky should be LLU unless you're on their "Connect" service which is BT Wholesale, so you're already on different kit at the exchange.
It is Sky Connect. I'll ask them some questions about a possible resolution but I'm not expecting much. I guess it will then be contract termination time. I wonder how difficult they will try to make that?