February 19th 2008, Our House, Derby
Having been messed about by Orange Broadband one too many times, enough was enough and we decided to do something about it.
But just what did we do?
Well just read our handy tip guide below and see how you can improve your broadband connection.
Tip One - Find a better broadband supplier
Yes this does sound obvious, but it is true.
Orange just weren't able to fix the problem we had. Often our broadband connection just seemed to disappear and after a lot of lengthy, expensive phone calls to their Indian "Helpline" they would claim we "have a line fault" and pass it on BT to fix. That often meant we didn't have broadband for weeks at a time. To make things worse our speed dropped over time from about 4meg till it eventually stuck at 2meg. All in all rubbish!
There are much better Internet Service Providers (ISPs) out there. Click here and you can get peoples opinions on how good, or bad different ISPs are. Orange scored an average of 4.1 out of 10 and most the reviews shown backed up what we found.
We picked ADSL24 not because they were the highest scorer but because their score (9.38 out of 10) was from a much much larger number of reviews than those ISPs that scored above them.
Having got our MAC (Migration Authorisation Code) from Orange we signed up to ADSL24 Home 30 package.
The switch over happened exactly when ADSL24 said it would, so on 19th Feb we connected for the first time at 4.4meg
Tip Two - The Master Socket
ADSL24 have a forum where their users, and interestingly ADSL24 own support team, are constantly discussing all things broadband.
One thing that caught our eye was how you can speed up your internet connection using "The Master Socket".
This isn't some mythical beast you have to hunt down and tame, this is actually the socket behind the faceplate where your phone line comes into the house. If you unscrew the two screws on the faceplate the bottom part comes off and you will see another telephone socket behind it. This is the Master Socket.
Connecting directly to this means you don’t get all the interference from the wiring inside your house, in particular from your own telephone extensions. The more interference, the slower your connection. If you think of your connection as a tube, any interference blocks up that tube reducing its capacity. Before and after tests with ADSL24 were impressive, our speed went from 4.4meg to 6.0meg.
Unfortunately you cant really leave it like this, at the very least it looks messy and your telephone extensions wont work.
Tip Three - A Filtered Faceplate
Fortunately there is a solution. The ADSL Nation XTE 2005 filtered faceplate.
This faceplate has 2 sockets, one for the phone and one for broadband. It has many advantages. Firstly you can wire in your telephone extensions so they work again. Secondly you no longer need those dangly, often pretty crappy it seems, micro filters on each extension socket as it filters them all for you. Thirdly the filter inside is far superior to the dangly ones and finally it looks much neater.
So one £15 purchase later we waited for it to arrive. When it did it was fitted, taking all of 2 minutes. We removed all the dangly filters from the telephone extensions and reconnected the phones, sky boxes, broadband router etc. Everything worked perfectly and we now have a broadband connection of 6.2meg. Pretty good for something so simple and easy to do.
Tip Four - The Ring Wire
The filtered faceplate allows you to reconnect your telephone extensions so they work again. Each extension has 3 different wires one blue and white, another white and blue (helpfully) and one orange and white. The blue and white ones are needed but the orange one isn't.
In the old days the orange wire was used to make phones ring, hence its name, but now its no longer used. You can connect this if you want but if you do it can act like a long thin ariel picking up interference and slowing your broadband connection.
We disconnected ours at both ends of the extension, as well as completely disconnecting all the wires from an extension no longer used. For us it made no difference, but other people have reported it increased their speed.
Tip Five - High Speed Shielded Modem Cable
There are cables and then there are cables. Often cables provided with electrical goods are low quality versions and the same is true for the modem cable that came with our router. So it was replaced by a Belkin High Speed Shielded version.
Once fitted our connection went up to 6.3meg, not a huge increase admittedly but for £5 not bad.
"Interesting" Broadband Facts
Below are some interesting facts we learnt about broadband whilst we were doing the above.
Connection Speed
Just because XP, in our case, says you have connected at 6.3meg doesn’t mean you can actually download at 6.3meg. Your max download speed is determined by something called an IP Profile, which is in turn determined by your Sync Speed.
Our Router, like most, allows you to see what your Sync speed is. This is very similar to the speed XP says we have connected at, for example our Router will show a Sync Speed of 6336 whilst XP will say 6.3meg and the higher the number that faster you can surf.
This becomes important when you look at the table below.
|
Sync Speed |
IP Profile |
|
160 - 287 |
135 Kbps |
|
288 - 384 |
250 Kbps |
| 385 - 575 | 350 Kbps |
| 576 - 863 | 500 Kbps |
| 864 - 1151 | 750 Kbps |
| 1152 - 1439 | 1000 Kbps |
| 1440 - 1727 | 1250 Kbps |
| 1728 - 2015 | 1500 Kbps |
| 2016 - 2271 | 1750 Kbps |
| 2272 - 2847 | 2000 Kbps |
| 2848 - 3423 | 2500 Kbps |
| 3424 - 3999 | 3000 Kbps |
| 4000 - 4543 | 3500 Kbps |
| 4544 - 5119 | 4000 Kbps |
| 5120 - 5695 | 4500 Kbps |
| 5696 - 6239 | 5000 Kbps |
| 6240 - 6815 | 5500 Kbps |
| 6816 - 7391 | 6000 Kbps |
| 7392 - 7967 | 6500 Kbps |
| 7968 - 8127 | 7000 Kbps |
| 8128 | 7150 Kbps |
Going back through what we did above, when we got 4.4meg our Sync speed was 4400. This gave us an IP Profile of 3500Kbps so the fastest we could download would have been 3.5meg at that point.
By fitting the filtered faceplate our Sync speed went up to 6216 giving us an IP Profile of 5000Kbps (5meg) and the high speed modem cable gave us a Sync speed 6304 and a 5500Kbps (5.5meg) IP Profile. So despite only Syncing at only an extra 88 when we upgraded the modem cable it was enough to put us up into the next IP Profile, and that was enough to allows us to download at 5.5meg, a full 2meg faster than when we first joined ADSL24 and a huge 3.5meg faster than Orange could manage!
Interestingly, if you were able to connect at the maximum sync speed of 8128 then fastest you could download would by 7.15meg not the 8meg you would of expected. This is something that’s put in place by BT and there's nothing you or your ISP can do about it.
Always On Broadband
Broadband used to be advertised as "always on" and compared to dial up, where you had to dial up each time you wanted to use the internet, it is. However occasionally your session will disconnect. Conveniently your router will detect this and automatically reconnect for you.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem but its worth knowing as every time it reconnects it will re-sync with the exchange. This may mean that you re-sync at a different speed which in turn may affect your IP Profile, changing the speed in which you can download.
Distance from exchange
The further away from the BT telephone exchange you are the slower your broadband will go. This doesn’t apply to fixed speed packages but does apply to all "up to 8 meg" broadband connections.
Think of it like blowing down a very very long straw, the further the air has to go the less powerful it becomes. There is nothing you can do about this.
LLU
LLU is short for Local Loop Unbundling. It means that an ISP has their own equipment at your BT exchange so that they don't have to use BT's.
This allows them to offer custom products and lower prices as they are not tied to BT's own offerings. Orange use LLU, ADSL24 do not. Now we don’t have the constant disconnections and have a much faster connection speed that makes us believe that a lot of the problems we had with Orange were caused by their own equipment.
Interestingly ISPs don’t have to tell you they are putting you on their LLU. However if they have and you decide move ISPs you will be charged £40+VAT for the privilege of coming off kit you never asked to go on. Nice!