Your broadband speed - post here

[Legthigh]

Not the greatest speeds but I usually get a sweet ping in games

[peterb]

Wish I had this all the time!

[BlackDwarf]

@Work. Wish this was my home connection.

[blackbox]

Not looking good...



Is there anything I can do about it?

[watercooled]

Depends, how far are you from the exchange?

[blackbox]

Depends, how far are you from the exchange?

watercooled, how can I check the distance to the exchange (sorry I am still learning)?

[watercooled]

Enter your phone number and postcode in here. Then click on the Locality button, it should tell you how far from the exchange you are in km, straight line distance.

[blackbox]

Thanks watercooled, appreciate the help. It says I am 2.14km (straight line) from the exchange. I don't have any experience with the distances, is it far or average?

Enter your phone number and postcode in here. Then click on the Locality button, it should tell you how far from the exchange you are in km, straight line distance.

[watercooled]

That does seem pretty low for that distance. I reckon something like 8Mb/s would be more reasonable for that distance on ADSL2+. You should try contacting BT and see if they can do anything, although I've heard their broadband customer services are crap. Is the modem plugged into the master socket? Also have a look on your modem/router for attenuation and sync speed (sometimes called data rate amongst other things) and post what they are.

[sammorris]

Typically, at 2100m from the exchange [actual line distance] you should be looking at around 6Mbps, possibly a bit higher if you have a very high quality line. Since that is as the crow flies however, your line will be longer.
The three lines I use are:
6600kbps (110% of distance estimation, 75% of attenuation estimation)
4100kbps (50% of distance estimation, 80% of attenuation estimation)
3900kbps (47% of distance estimation, 90% of attenuation estimation)

[burble]

Don't read too much into the straight line distances, phone lines never (well, very very rarely) take a straight line from the exchange to your property.

[watercooled]

I did add some distance on to the straight line, 2100m true distance would be more like 16Mbps theoretical max.

[blackbox]

Thanks for the help.

I have a BT Home Hub 2.0 and it is connected to the only socket in flat (next to the front door). I have used the BT supplied phone line filter. I have not tried BT customer services, since I wasn't sure if I should be able to reach higher speeds.

What speed should I except (Mb/s wise)? sammorris, you mentioned a couple of numbers, according to wikipedia I should just divide it by 1000 to compare it to the 1.8Mb/s (0.58Mb/s)? I figure this means I should expect at least close to 4Mb/s. When using Steam etc., the line has never gone above 240-260 kB/s (if I have this correct, the byte and bit notation gets confusing sometimes).

My PC is linked to the Hub with a Netgear wireless G/N USB adapter, since it is upstairs and there is no neat way to link via ethernet. The signal strenght is very good. Before joining the forum, I decided to anyway ordered a 30m cat5e ethernet cable to see if it will make a difference. It has been dispached and is suppose to arrive end of this week. Is this the right cable?

I can't access the attenuation and sync speed at the moment. I can check tonight. This should be shown in the router interface via internet explorer?

Lastly, should I start a separate thread in the networking and broadband section not to hijack this one?

Thanks again for helping me to understand all of this!

That does seem pretty low for that distance. I reckon something like 8Mb/s would be more reasonable for that distance on ADSL2+. You should try contacting BT and see if they can do anything, although I've heard their broadband customer services are crap. Is the modem plugged into the master socket? Also have a look on your modem/router for attenuation and sync speed (sometimes called data rate amongst other things) and post what they are.

Typically, at 2100m from the exchange [actual line distance] you should be looking at around 6Mbps, possibly a bit higher if you have a very high quality line. Since that is as the crow flies however, your line will be longer.
The three lines I use are:
6600kbps (110% of distance estimation, 75% of attenuation estimation)
4100kbps (50% of distance estimation, 80% of attenuation estimation)
3900kbps (47% of distance estimation, 90% of attenuation estimation)

[watercooled]

Sometimes removing the bell/ring wire can make a big difference. You can get an iPlate from BT which does essentially the same thing but costs money. Note however this involves opening the master socket which BT don't really want you to do, but loads of people do it, just bear it in mind.

To get from Mb to MB just divide by 8. I.e. 8Mbps = 1MBps.

Don't pay any attention to the Windows signal strength indicator, I found recently that a laptop in the front room would claim full strength but barely manage a few Mbps. There is a chance the wireless connection is the bottleneck so it's worth trying with a cable to eliminate it as a possibility if nothing else. And yeah that's the right sort of cable.

The sync speed/attenuation should be somewhere in the router's web interface but I've not used the Home Hub so I don't know where exactly.

Maybe you could ask a mod to move these posts to a new thread if you like, but I think it's OK discussing this here.

[blackbox]

The link for the ring/bell wire is very helpful. Doesn't look too difficult, but I will check the ethernet cable first (once it arrives).

Found the following on the router:

Noise margin (Down/Up) 11.2 dB / 9.3 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 56.5 dB / 34.9 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 4.0 dBm / 1.0 dBm

[watercooled]

That attenuation seems pretty high considering your distance to the exchange but even so you should be able to get a ~4Mbps sync speed.