Transferring Broadband

[cubabit]

Hi Everyone,

I havent posted in a while as I have been really busy at work while we moved offices. The biggest strife of which was broadband.

We arranged a telecommunications company to consult us on the move - they sorted out our new Norstar system, our CAT5 cabling - and advised us on transferring the broadband. The main guy there led us to beleive, saying he had spoke to Bt about this, that as we moving within the same exchange the ADSL would move with the line if we transferred it. Crap! We wre without broadband for 10 days which for a web design company is rather embarrassing! We were reduced to using a 56K modem shared among 8 people - argh! We finally got our spanking new connection activated last Friday.

Anyway we are back on now, and the likelyhood of aforementioned company being paid soon is slim, but does anyone else have any thoughts or experiences of moving broadband?

[Blademrk]

I've just switched from 2mb Orange to 6mb Pipex Homecall (activated on the 25/09/06).
I don't know if it's a problem with my router, or if my service hasn't settled done yet (they said give it 10-15 days).

I'm beginning to wish I hadn't switched.

Firstly I didn't get to choose my new username - which I think is the start of the problem, as my new username was 2 charcters longer than the firmware on my router allowed.

Not a problem, I thought, as I knew there was a newer version of the firmware which fixed this issue.

Since flashing the firmware I can be surfing the net 1 minute and get a dropped connection the next which is fixed by switching the router off for a couple of seconds and then switching it back on and wait for it to reconnect.
This will happen at least once a day. I haven't tried the modem they sent me yet (as I'd rather get the router working as I have 2 PC's and an Xbox 360 connected through it) but I'm thinking of trying that just to see if I still get the same problems

secondly (which I think is a problem with pipex) is my speed fluctuates wildly some days (checked using a program called Naria I downloaded from ADSLGuide.org) I get download speeds of around 5000k and then on other days (like this morning) I get 500k.

I know 2mb isn't that fast, but it seemed a lot faster than my pipex account.
Also, sing Xfire to monitor my favourite servers, it doesn't look like my pings have dropped much.


All in all, although it's only been just over a week so far, I think I should have stayed with Orange (at least it was working properly)

[listy]

im on pipex max was on dcomms they were dire ping issues all night not able to play most online game since would get kicked for high ping pipex is alot better been on them 20th of last month and had no problem with them speed still seem kinda up and down but no fussed since i can play at night

[chicken]

BT upgraded our work one from 2Mb to "up to 8Mb" and it took out our connection for about two weeks! As you said, not good for a web-based company!

The stupid thing was I could see it fluctuating and crashing out every time it got up to about 5.5Mb/s so I asked the BT guy in the very beginning to cap it at 4Mb, well below the rough area but still a speed boost from before. He told me no, we'd have to wait out the 10 days for it to settle before they'd even do that....

...by the time my boss was about ready to rip them all a set of new orifii for dragging their feet and continuing the problem well past the magical 10 days, they finally "came up with the idea" of manually setting a bandwidth cap and it worked... geniuses

[alexkoon]

In the process - migrated from Zen to Be (as Zen had a 50Gb cap). Zen was very good and I never had any issues. But Be allowed me to save a fair bit and had a very good FUP from what I hear. Anyway - without connection for 3 days now. Its a migration, but they managed to disconnect me but not connect me. Be can't do anything apparently as its all in the hands of BT Openreach or Openworld.....who knows.....

[Craig321]

Hi Everyone,

I havent posted in a while as I have been really busy at work while we moved offices. The biggest strife of which was broadband.

We arranged a telecommunications company to consult us on the move - they sorted out our new Norstar system, our CAT5 cabling - and advised us on transferring the broadband. The main guy there led us to beleive, saying he had spoke to Bt about this, that as we moving within the same exchange the ADSL would move with the line if we transferred it. Crap! We wre without broadband for 10 days which for a web design company is rather embarrassing! We were reduced to using a 56K modem shared among 8 people - argh! We finally got our spanking new connection activated last Friday.

Anyway we are back on now, and the likelyhood of aforementioned company being paid soon is slim, but does anyone else have any thoughts or experiences of moving broadband?

We've had lots of troubles with our broadband, mainly due to living quite far out.

We've been without brodband for a month+ at a time .

Pipex seems pretty good, the look better than BT Broadband anyway...

Transferring shouldn't take too long at all, especially if you live close to an exchange.

Craig.

[cubabit]

Thanks for your input guys. My expeirience was with actually trying to move broadband from one physical location to another. Has anyone else done that?

[Iain]

As a project manager working for an ISP, I can sympathise. When you move broadband you end up with 1 of 3 options

BT Products
IP Stream - up to 2Mb
IP Stream Max - up to 8Mb

or

LLU - up to 8Mb

There is also ADSL2+ (up to 24Mb) but that's very restricted in geographical reach. If you move from IP Stream to IP Stream Max then you will always have 10 days of instability while they play with the line speed and work out the optimum speed for your connection. There's no way around that whether your ISP is BT or anyone else. Following that 10 day period you should then get the best speed for your line, in theory although not always in practice. If you're on IP Stream Max and getting less than 2Mb and it's unstable then you can request your ISP to move you back to IP Stream, it's a more stable product.

If you are moving physical location then you need to work out if you're ISP has LLU enabled exchanges in the new area, that generally affects the quality of service you're likely to receive. Obviously if your ISP is BT then LLU doesn't come into it