Tuesday, November 28, 2006

ADSL Pain

I live less than 0.7miles from my local telephone exchange. I pay my ISP for an "ADSL Max" service. This service promises "up to" 8Mbps connectivity. I understand that "up to" does not mean "at least" and it does not mean "close to" and it does not mean "around". But, surely, it doesn't mean "1.5Mbps on a good day and 300Kbps on a bad day?"

I'm currently on hold to my ISP.... I wonder what they will say.....



[Update 2006-11-28 10:12. After 15 minutes on hold, my ISP took one look at my line configuration and the stats I quoted at them and agreed there was a big problem. Either my filter is bad, there's something extraordinarily noisy in the flat (from an electrical point of view) or there's horrific contention at the exchange. They've raised a ticket with BT to investigate further. Progress, of a sort]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck. A friend of mine (lives in Central London, not out here in middle of nowhere) has had trouble persuading BT that 8Mbps means just that, and not 512K. Apparently they are under the impression that this is an acceptable regular speed, and don't feel obligated to do much about it.

Richard Brown said...

It's utterly infuriating. BT returned the fault to my ISP saying they could find no problems. The ISP can see that there is a lot of noise on the line and, after I confirmed that there are no phone extensions, that I am using a microfilter and that I've placed the router away from obvious sources of interference, they sent the ticket back to BT.

I'm not hopeful that anything will result.

I've just ordered a new filter - just in case there's something wrong with the current one but, apart from that, it's not clear what else I can do.

The flat is within a mile of the exchange and I'm beginning to wonder that there may be some nastiness in how the phone lines are distributed from the BT cables outside the development to the individual flats. They're probably wound around the EDF substation in the car park or something equally nasty!