To get that much of a drop in speed, you either have a bad cable (oddly enough, DSL still works even if one wire is broken) or a ton more people in your neighborhood have signed up and the crosstalk in the cable has shot way up. If you haven't already done so, try to eliminate inside wire as a source of the problem. On my side of the pond, our demarc is a box on the side of the house and the newer protectors (in said box) have an RJ11 jack that you can just plug into and it disconnects the inside wire automatically. Older protectors need the inside wire removed manually and a test cable put in its place. If you can find said box (if applicable) also poke around and see how many pairs are in the cable coming from the field side, as sometimes a pair in the drop cable can go bad and you can try a spare pair if you have one (a technician from BT would need to swap them). Edit: Also, if you can log into your modem and post your current link stats, that would be useful.
I'm 99% sure that's the case here - I think I remember it being mentioned at one point. Well, that's near Longton, so I can understand that. It's the only place I've ever seen EDL graffiti. Lovely. Fortunately I live near Bagnall. I'll have a look around. When it happened, I thought someone may have just dislodged something.
It's also possible your line uses aluminium instead of copper. BT did that a lot in the 70's to save money. Aluminium cable is "passable" for voice, but absolute s*** for broadband.
Some years ago when Virgin Media had upgraded their service I was getting shite speeds, when before they had been good. I had them out several times to trouble shoot. They ended up replacing the cable from the cab to my house with a thicker cable. No cost to me. So if you gotta hassle a company for better wiring then do it, assuming you can be arsed with the..hassle.
I will endevour to do this soon. I spoke to my neighbour this afternoon. They get 12Mbit/s.I remember that being my quoted maximum, though I'm not getting it. And to think I used to get >24...
.... yep just about, missing a few little nuances though, hope you find some of this informative at least. I'll be repeating some of what you said! Openreach indeed own the copper which underpins ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL aka Infinity and the fibre which underpins G.fast aka Superfast. And yes, that absolutely is the last "mile" from the exchange, down to the streetside cabinet, and out to the property, which is called the Local Loop. Side note, it's a loop because it's a copper pair in TX and RX which makes a loop between the Foreign Exchange Station (the telephone at the property) and Foreign Exchange Office (the telephone exchange). When referring to ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL aka Infinity, you have to break it into two components. The first, is the copper phone line (ignoring g.fast for now), and the second is the ADSL/ADSL2+/VDSL service running atop it. For the phone line, you can have bundled, or unbundled, telephony service. Bundled is where the ISP pays BT Wholesale for a phone line, who provide a telephony service to the ISP, and they sub-contract with Openreach to fit a line in a property upon which to run said BT Wholesale telephony service. When there's a fault on the line, the ISP has to log it with BT Wholesale, who in turn have to log it with Openreach - typically, this is an API which just binds the two ticket systems together directly without much direct interaction with BT Wholesale. Chinese whispers happens a lot, and £150 call-out charges are threatened at all steps of the way. Unbundled is where the ISP itself puts their own telephony service infrastructure into the Openreach exchange, and they pay Openreach for access to the copper wires. When there's a fault on the line, your ISP logs this directly with Openreach. Now, the broadband element. For a bundled phone line, the ISP is also going to be paying BT Wholesale for their wholesale broadband offerings. The more lines they buy, the better price they pay per line. The broadband element is 'jumpered' at the exchange, into a broadband termination device; typically this is a honking great Cisco router, which terminates the PPPoA session, hands off the authentication to a RADIUS server, and has lots and lots and lots of dark fibre or leased line circuits back into the ISP's core network. Typically, this honking great Cisco router is operated by (BT wholesale or openreach? I'm not sure these days) and not the ISP. Smaller ISPs will just pay BT Wholesale for a white-label service and won't run their own backhaul at this point. Larger ISPs, like TalkTalk, will have a hand-off on this honking great router into their own network, and they will handle the backhaul on the way up to the internet. The actual broadband running down the bundled phone line however is always going to be within what Openreach and BT Wholesale offer. For an unbundled phone line, the ISP puts their own honking great Cisco router into the exchange and terminate the PPPoA themselves. They take care of the backhaul themselves. They pay Openreach to jumper the service onto their equipment. I think these days the only ISP that actually do this is what's now running under the Sky broadband offerings. There used to be a few ISPs, but Sky bought them all up and consolidated. The ISP can pretty much run whatever technology they can get Openreach to agree to allow - it's why Bulldog (which I believe is part of Sky now) was able to pioneer ADSL2+ 24Mbps services before Openreach/BT Wholesale got it done. It's also why the VPI/VCI settings are subtly different, doesn't go to BT/Openreach kit! So who's responsible for a 0.8Mbps download on a 24Mbps service? If your line length is relatively low that drop from your cabinet is totally screwed, and the ISP needs to be hassled until Openreach come out and sort it. Alternatively, find an ex-Openreach engineer who is semi-retired. They can usually fix easy faults with the master socket and internal wiring but won't climb poles etc. Some older properties actually have aluminium wires not copper and that can really tank the broadband service. So can water ingress, rust on the termination box on the pole, etc. When ADSL 500k, 1M, 2M first came out, that was a few miles all the way back to the exchange. For speeds much over 3Mbps, you're actually only copper to the green cabinet, then it's a fibre backhaul; the jumpering happens in the green cabinet in this situation. Infinity is always in the cabinet too. Having worked for an ISP who put tickets in to Openreach ... as much as they say they are fair and Ofcom monitors it, they know which are the "good" ISPs to work with and which are the crap ones. They'll push back harder on ISPs who send them poor quality tickets all the time. You just gotta keep pushing for an engineer when you're in that boat. So, to be clear, Virgin Media call it Fibre Broadband just like BT call Infinity also Fibre Broadband, as Sky call it fibre broadband. They're equally lying bastards. With VM just as with Openreach, it is fibre to the nearest green cab and then USUALLY copper to the building itself. VM are however starting to run fibre into the property, as are Openreach for the 150Mbps/300Mbps g.fast service. The copper runs are usually pretty short, and DOCSIS3 is a great protocol, so we get good speed outta it. I guess we've also forgotten Hull where Kingston Telecom own the copper and that's that. But then, everyone forgets Hull! Yeah like Hyperoptic which light up buildings in Manchester and London etc and use gpon kit. Also Seethelight who go into a lot of new build housing estates and replace Openreach, who are simply not given permission to dig trenches. Is there any Virgin Media in your area? Worth checking on virginmedia.com if you're not sure. Also, no matter your ISP, https://www.bt.com/broadband/availability/ should tell you what you can get at your property.
Is it worth mentioning that the fiber cable doesn't mean fiber to your house? I've been with Virgin since before they owned the line. It was NTL before them. It's fiber to the cab (hopefully) then copper wire to your house. Hence me needing a thicker cable, as I was at the end of the normal cables reach. At least after it went beyond 20MB. It was fine till then. I dunno if more MB was the issue or just more subscribers in a given location. The thicker cable sorted me out though. Had several upgrades since, but not checked the speeds. Honestly it is fast enough. If I found out now it was under what it should be I'd just hurt myself. Like I got the THICC cable..aint getting better till we get fiber to the house! EDIT: I've not checked in a while but when I had my issue it was with 50MB. I get waaay more than that now. I know I'm getting in excess of 100MB's I just can be arsed to check. Pretty sure it should be 200 or 300 MB but I aint looking.
I'd love for that to happen. Musn't grumble, 50mb connection with a view is not to be sniffed at. It seems to take forever for fibre to the house to get sorted. Virgin were finishing off cabling our area when we got back from NZ - two years later we moved and it still wasn't up and running. Don't think there are plans round this way.
Yeah I feel that. My net does what I want it too. I edited above to add my connection is now above what it was when I had issue with it. It's plenty fast. If it aint what I pay for then..man I don't even wanna know. I share my connection with my brother so I need decent bandwidth. Otherwise maybe I'd drop down a tier. But yeah..fiber to the house?! That is like a tech-nerds wet dream! ALL THE POWA!
Yep, as per this... ...it's indeed fibre to the cabinet for most VM services. I think the 1Gig in Coventry is FTTP? Not certain on that, haven't looked into it. I think they did a swap of cable types a couple years back when the faster speeds started coming out. The connectors look different these days at least - I had VM back in 2008 for a year before moving off-network until last year, and it sure looks thicker and has a different connector. Might be related? Actually don't really know. I do know that VM only support their own special triple-shielded cable.
Isn't g.fast still copper to the cabinet, with some extra fancy gear in the cabinet end (and a few hundred meter limit for it to work at all)?
Okay I'm getting g.fast confused with the "full fibre" option. g.fast you're right is basically VDSL but faster again. There's also "ultrafast" which is actually FTTP. When my parents had it installed, Kelly rocked up and pulled fibre down from the pole to their house and put in a new termination point for it. Openreach came a week or so later and then did the new master socket etc. I haven't actually seen it yet myself due to lockdown, so not sure on the physical topology of it. I also believe that the phone service is now IP backhaul, with I assume an ONT that has a PSTN port wired into the old master socket and internal wiring, and the ethernet port on the ONT to the router. Again, haven't seen it myself yet, so I'm far from sure on this. On this service, in the tiny little backwater countryside village my parents live, they could have 910Mbps down / 100Mbps up for £55 pcm. And yet here I am in one of the top ten UK cities and I get at best 37Mbps from Infinity (I got about 34 real world) or 362Mbps from Virgin Media.
Cable types are the same from when it was Analogue and NTL to how it is now with VM and Digital. The only difference is that the "Drop Cable" the one that get's buried in your garden etc is now Black and not Brown. The connectors change as they change supplier but essentially they are the same connector, it's just put on the cable using different tools and look's different, but they work the same way. There are 2 types of "Siamese Drop Cables" one is RG6 and the other is RG11, RG6 was used for up to 150m away from the B-Cab, the one at the end of the street and RG11 was used for 150m to 350m, but as speeds increase they have reduced the distance for the RG6 cable, down to around a max distance of 80m. Some areas though do use RG7 though but not many do that and just stick to the RG6 and RG11. They did change the internal cable though, the one that they will run along skirting boards etc inside your house from RG59 to RG6 as RG6 is better for speed etc and has more strength to it.
Also G.fast is kind of dead. Source for both: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...akes-on-future-uk-g-fast-broadband-plans.html
I'm trying to sort my parents internet in rural Scotland, BT is the only provider. No other ISP has even got LLU at the exchange. Currently on around 12Mb/s ADSL which is crippled with any uploading. Thanks to gross incompetance from BT we ordered Fibre in April which never went live because..... get this..... we are wired directly to the exchange. No cabinet. And these chumps didn't realise or bother to notify us. Anyway long story short, I speedtested everyone in the houses 4G and my mum gets a whopping 55Mb/s from EE. So we are in the process of getting an antenna and a 4G router. Will report back!
So out of interest (and because I often get annoyed at the internet as it seems to be very inconsistant) I just checked my broadband on my PC vs my 4g on my phone. Get the same ping (26ms) ~11 vs ~79 down (was ~63 first time I ran it on my phone then downloaded the app so I could see upload and got that?) ~0.6 vs ~29 up.... So could someone point me in the direction of a 4g router I guess or something? Quick look at smarty seems to be a good shout for a data only sim? Edit: Or a 3G contract, includes a router for £22 a month unlimited? Which I'm pretty sure is less than I'm paying now for ADSL from plusnet And of course a benefit is being able to continue the contract if you move more easily I'm guessing?
So my research led me to the Huawei B535.... 4 Lan ports and the option to connect antennae. We plan to test all the house sims in it when it arrives then take a sim-only contract with the best one. I've read that the mobile companies cannot discriminate on the device you insert the sim into as long as its not for business purposes or more than 10 devices/users.
Oof that's pricey, probably would undo the good since we're not sure where we're moving to next so we might just be able to get fibre which would obviously be a similar monthly price to the 4G but maybe better performance, but I do like the flexibility of the 4G idea. Tempted to contact plusnet and take a punt on the 3 £22 a month deal.
Be sure to price compare against Giffgaff, they're not a perfect mobile provider but they do have a key distinguishing benefit - you can upgrade, downgrade or halt your monthly plan anytime you like. Pretty nifty. No unlimited option, though, last time I checked, I think it maxes out at 30GB/month. edit - and it's O2's coverage/masts that they're using, for whatever that's worth in your area.
