Crap broadband speeds in an area of average speeds

Is there any possibility of getting Openreach or anyone else to have a
good look at why broadband speeds in a specific area are lower than
the adjoining areas?

I live on an estate that was built around 1998-2000, and my broadband
speed is ~2.5Meg with ADSL+, ADSL2 or ADSLMax (not sure which). A
speed checker says that vanilla ADSL for my address is around 1Meg.

If you plug in the addresses of houses around the estate, they
register at about 4-5Meg. Even the houses on the other side of the
fence from me (about the same distance from the exchange) show as
3.5Meg. I assume that the signal shouldn't deteriorate by 3Meg over
the half-a-mile from the end of the road to my house (the most likely
path for the cable).

It's not a 'fault' as such in that the actual speeds achieved are as
good as a speed checker suggests, and it probably affects about 100
houses (how many of those would be bothered I don't know). Is there
any way to get someone to look at the speeds to see if they could be
improved? Is there something about 1990's cabling that slows things
right down?

There is FTTC available, but that would only improve speeds to 7Meg -
I'm not paying another £15/month to get speeds that most people get as
standard.

 

Hugo Nebula wrote...

1 - Do the houses over the fence actually get 3-4Mb ?
2 - The houses over the fence may be on a much shorter line from the exchange
than you are.
3 - Do you have too many phones/computers connected to your line

 

Be very suspicious about the line speeds predicted by the various sites. All
these are derived from BT's system and are notoriously inaccurate. There
could be a multitude of reasons. The first thing to do is make some basic
checks. Assuming you have a master NTE5 socket remove the faceplate and plug
the router modem into the test socket. The test socket is the one that is
exposed by removing the faceplate. This isolates the internal wiring. Check
the sync rate and if it has improved significantly then you probably have a
fault in your internal wiring.

You should also follow the guide here that gives a number of things to
check.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/lowSNR.htm

Plenty of help hear so check back when you have done the basic tests.

Peter Crosland

 

<conspiracy theory> BT's line checker is for the benefit of BT and ISPs: it
shows a low speed available, then when the actual speed is crap but faster
crap than the checker showed the punter is (relatively) happy. </ct>

The result for my line is 'up to 1Mbps but an engineer might have to call' -
I connect at 2.6 - 2.9Mbps and get the d/l speed commensurate with that.

 

Who's your ISP? If you have one with good support try ringing them and
see if your router is disconnecting too frequently. Too many
disconnections will cause your speed to be lower than expected.

Who says most people get 7Mbps 'as standard'. I think the national
measured average is around 6Mbps (I can't find the link ATM), so most
people /don't/ get 7Mbps.

 

[Default] On Wed, 5 Oct 2011 08:57:18 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,

I've done all those tests before, and 2.5Meg is about the best I can
get at the end of BT's bit of cable. That's not the problem. I'm
getting a higher speed than that predicted for my line, so it appears
that I'm wringing out the fastest speed I can from it.

It's the bit of cable between the faceplate and the end of my road
that I'm querying. If the line speeds are innaccurate, surely they are
consistently innaccurate, i.e., they underestimate the speeds
achievable for everyone. I've used the exchange mapping from
Samknows.com to plot predicted speeds in the neighbourhood. What I'm
querying is why does my road achieve such a lower predicted speeds
than the roads around and about?

I've run a BT speedtest, and the results are:

"Test1 comprises of two tests

1. Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
Download Speed 2459 Kbps
Download speedachieved during the test was - 2459 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 1200-4000 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :3060 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 2699 Kbps

2. Upstream Test: -provides background information.
Upload Speed 346 Kbps
Upload speed achieved during the test was - 346 Kbps
Additional Information:
Upstream Rate IP profile on your line is - 448 Kbps

We were unable to identify any performance problem with your service
at this time"

It's this last line I'd like help on. How do I get from that, to "your
performance could be a lot better; here, we'll do something about it".

 

[Default] On Wed, 5 Oct 2011 01:24:31 +0100, a certain chimpanzee, Jon

No idea.

Probably, which is why I have also checked the speeds at the 'start'
of the estate where the new road connects to the end of the main road
that's the most likely path from the exchange. There's a 3Meg drop in
predicted speeds from there to my house.

Personally? Or on the estate?

The former, no. One router and one phone.

If the latter, there's about two hundred houses on my estate (half is
cabled, so they may connect that way). I would presume we're about as
wired as any other suburban estate. Is that a possible reason for the
low speeds, and something Openreach should do something about?

 

[Default] On Wed, 5 Oct 2011 09:18:07 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,

Similar to mine. Do you live in a suburb of a major city less than two
miles from an exchange too?

 

[Default] On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 09:56:47 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,

Do you really mean FTTC/Infinity achieves average of 6Mbps? Or is that
copper wire?

If the latter, that's my complaint. I'm paying £11.49/month for
2.5Mbps. I would begrudge paying £28/month for super-duper Infinity
FTTC if the best I could get was 7Mbps.

 

No, in a village. The exchange, by road, is almost exactly 1.85 miles but
the cable might 'wander' a bit as some sites show 3 - 3.2km/2 miles.

Looking at other houses in the village, one is around 3Mbps or a bit over (I
can't remember exactly) and the others seem to be significantly worse than
mine. I have done some work on the PC side of it and, with an updated
driver, the old Thomson 'frog' just connects in the same range every time
with none of this 'training' crap needed.

 

Forget about what other people may be getting. The figures are unlikely to
have any relevance to you line. Have you tried removing the faceplate and
using the test socket? The only way you are going to make progress is to be
systematic.


Peter Crosland

 

I was replying to the 'most people' bit. As most people don't have FTTC
it doesn't really factor in.

That does seem poor, if real. What tells you that you'd get 7Mbps? If it
is real and combined with your 2.5Mbps currently, it suggests that
you've got a long/poor run of copper between you and the cabinet, I'd say.

 

[Default] On Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:50:15 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,

www.bt.com/infinity

"Faster Total Broadband Faster BT Total BroadbandGreat news! You can
now get faster download speeds using our upgraded fibre optic network.
Faster Total Broadband is only available on our Unlimited Broadband
and Calls package. 7.2Mb Now"

So how do I go about turning that into someone doing something about
it?

 

[Default] On Wed, 5 Oct 2011 12:14:14 +0100, a certain chimpanzee,

Yes, done that (and have a tee-shirt to prove it). Removed the bell
wire, etc. As I replied in another post before, the speed I get is the
speed that speed checkers, estimates, etc. all suggest I should get
(or better).

What I am concerned about is that the speed I should get is so
dramatically lower than what people less than fifty metres away should
be getting.

 

Wait until FTTH is rolled out to your house or move house?

As you said, you're already getting above expectation speeds for your
property, so you're going to struggle trying to persuade someone that
there's 'something wrong'. Just because other people in your vicinity
get /predicted/ higher speeds, doesn't mean you should. At the very
least you need to speak to your immediate neighbours and see what real
speeds they're getting.

 

I don't know if things have changed but at the start of the rollout of
FTTC, if the engineer couldn't attain a throughput of 15(fifteen)Mbps,
you couldn't have the service.

 

you can try reporting it to your ISP as an internet fault and if you are
lucky a nice BT Openreach man will remake all your joints and try and
route you down a better pair.

If you are unlucky he will say its within spec and you will get to pay
100 quid + for no improvement.

 

But are these houses fifty metres away fed from the same cabinet as you?
Even if you know categorically that the answer to that is 'yes', there's
still a gazillion-and-one things that could explain why they get better
results than you - and I'm speaking as an ex-BT cable jointer with
almost 30 years service in.

We tend to take broadband so much for granted these days but believe me,
it's a bloody miracle that we get what we do. It takes a hell of a lot
of hard work to keep services going - it's quite surreal being 10ft down
in a manhole with a pump chugging away up top and barely being able to
keep up with the water pouring into the hole, and trying to joint 400
tiny wires at the same time!!

 

I'd be *very* interested to know if this is still the case. I've just
checked 3 different FTTC suppliers, and it appears that my exchange has
very recently gone live (FTTC was scheduled for 31 December) *but* the
estimated download speed is a mere 12Mb/s.
I'd hate to change ISP and then find I can't have FTTC.

 

I think the fundamental issue is that whilst BT have a universal service
obligation for telephony, they have no such standard for broadband. If
you have a long run of poor quality cable, so long as telephony is OK
you're unlikely to get them to do anything to give you faster broadband.