ADSL in the UK (Broadband)

A bit of a rant, but very relevant all the same.

So we all have ADSL to our houses and our businesses. It’s all over copper cables laid by men with clubs in the stone age. I understand that changing the copper cabling in the UK will be a pretty big deal. Why not allow companies / people to pay for a fiber install to our doors if we want ?

Here comes the reason for the blog …

We moved into a new build house in 2006. When the house was built we asked for 3 phones lines to be installed at the same time, which they were. So tell me why each line syncs at a completely different speed ? As of right now the 3 lines show as follow -
Line 1 – 5114 kbps / 1087 kbps (ADSL 2+)
Line 2 – 2304 kbps / 640 kbps (ADSL Max)
Line 3 – 4027 kbps / 800 kbps (ADSL 2+)

When they were all ADSL Max’s the downstreams were about the same. It’s not the routers, the ADSL filters or the in house cables. So that leaves the route to the exchange. So is it that each line takes a different route or that each line is on a different quality cable ? If it’s either of these why can’t we get it fixed ?

Another interesting point is that there’ are more new houses going up in field across from us. So when a they have a new phone line put in the following happens our phone line drops a few times.
Firstly why should our phone lines drop if someone else is having a line put in ? (What if I was on a 999 call and it was life or death ?) Interestingly when the lines are back we get sync from 3mb to 6mb. A few weeks ago we had over 6.2mb on one line and it lasted for a week until someone else moved in nearby ! I guess it’s just if the BT person moves our cables one way or the other.

Last point is in the morning when I get up for work I check the speed of our main ADSL line, yup the 5mb one. About once a week it’s down to 4.2mb or so. I can get it back to above 5mb by software rebooting the router. It usually takes about 4 goes or so and will happily stay at over 5mb until some magic happens overnight or someone nearby moves in. Why on earth does rebooting a router a lot mean I get better connections (yes someone will say it’s server side speed syncing but that’s not an answer) ? Surely this technology isn’t like a PC where each reboot cleans it up ?

Can I please pay someone at BT or whatever to sort these lines out and if not is that not a massive whole in the market ?

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Tags: ADSL, ADSL 2+, BT ADSL, BT Wholesale

This entry was posted by Chris on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 3:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.