New House - New problems

[Attila the Bun]

Morning HEXUS, I need some advice.

I have moved from Bath to The Sticks recently and have inherited some really annoying networking problems which I could use some pointers on.

Here is the scenario:

1.Victorian terraced house with thick limestone walls. But with mostly stud interior walling.

2.Telephone exchange pwnd outright by BT but only about half a mile from the house. Compared with with the previous house which had an LLU exchange 2 miles away. Users of Bath exchange - 10,000, users of new exchange- 3,000.

3.Bloody mad previous owner had a telephone fetish and installed 3 wall sockets plus an insanely long extension cable with 3 sockets on it.

4.The line into the house does so between floors and appears again in 3 locations: downstairs (which I think is the primary socket), in the main bedroom and at the back of the house, in what is currently used as an office.

Here are some facts.

1. The net package is 8mb unlimited from Utility Warehouse which gave me, on average, between 4mb and 6mb download in Bath and, I have to say, really good customer service. Speedtest indicated that the base provider for this service was Bulldog (now owned by TalkTalk). I transferred the package to the new house, Speedtest now says Tiscali (also owned by TalkTalk).
I now between 1.3mb (majority of the time) and 5.89mb (Monday mornings at 6:30). And ping rates are 100+ ms.

2. The internet stops working intermittently. There is no pattern to this stoppage.

3. I have tried hard wired and wireless router connections. the Hard wired has slightly better transfer rates but disconnects more frequently. The wireless does bizarre transfer speeds ranging from 21% to 78% strength despite being in direct line of sight.

4. I have tried all the telephone sockets for the router and only 2 work (downstairs and the office area) but only the downstairs socket lets the telephone work.

5. I have an MOD site about 100m from my house.

Here are my thoughts.

1. I have an utterly screwed telephone system in the house which needs immediate and expensive care.

2. Tiscali are utterly pants (with skiddies) and should be replaced forthwith. OR...BT are having a laugh as they own the exchange and are trying to make everyone else look bad.

3. My 4 year old wireless g ADSL router is in need of an upgrade.

4. The MoD are nicking all my bandwidth.

5. Ghosts.

Your suggestions

Might include all of the above but if anyone has some practical advice on where to start I would be eternally grateful.

[Funkstar]

1. I have an utterly screwed telephone system in the house which needs immediate and expensive care.

I know the feeling. My house had two lines at one point, each with mulitiple sockets. I have the router and master phone point (it's a Panasonic cordless kit with three handsets) all off the main phone socket, nothing else plugged into any extension.

2. Tiscali are utterly pants (with skiddies) and should be replaced forthwith.

Pretty much, although I wouldn't be quite so polite. I'd recommend Plus.net. Been using them for the past couple of months, and not had a single problem.

3. My 4 year old wireless g ADSL router is in need of an upgrade.

Possible. What make is it? I use a Draytek wired only router and an Edimax N access point. gives me a lot of flexibility. I'll be getting a couple more APs at some point and configuring them as a mesh to get total coverage of the house and garden.

4. The MoD are nicking all my bandwidth.

I would have thought they would have either dedicated circuits or leased lines. could be wrong though. But I doubt they would use any more bandwidth than a business.

5. Ghosts.

Nah, ghosts tend to use very little bandwidth, they have trouble they keyboards and when you can walk through walls, pushing a mouse becomes a challenge.

[oldboy47]

Some basic questions:

Are the sockets newer style or old?

Is the service from the street underground or overhead?

Have you tried disconnecting any of the sockets (by removing a wire inside) to determine how the sockets are all connected?

Have you checked that the connections inside the sockets are made and therefore should be working?

Usually the hard wired router would give a better performance than the wireless device.

This link might help http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/btsockets.htm

[cheesemp]

Some advise that helped me:

Try and determine master socket - Rip out any other extensions (or at least disconnect from master socket).
Buy a new faceplate (I already had a new style NTE5 so just replaced bottom half with new plate)
Buy new filter (and maybe router).

Doing this boosted my connection from 6Mb to 14Mb!

[gss03]

My thought would be:

1) find your master socket. Strip off the bottom part to the faceplate and plug your filter & router into this - this isolates you from the extensions in the house. If the speed improves the you can determine it's your internal wiring that needs looked at which will be at your expense as BT won't touch that.

2) I'd move your Broadband to someone like Andrews and Arnold that are very good at sorting out BB issues and kick BT when required.

3) Buy a new router so you can compare and contrast the speed differences over 2 different sets of hardware. Personally I'd say Draytek 2820Vn, but they are expensive, but worth it as they are more tolerant to dodgy lines (they also used to supply custom firmware for poor signal, not sure if this is still the case).

[Phage]

1) Yes
2) Certainly are.
3) Possibly - but unlikely
4) They don't have the budget for their own network. Makes sense.
5) Nowadays, they're not ghosts. They're heartbeat challenged.

[cheesemp]

My thought would be:

1) find your master socket. Strip off the bottom part to the faceplate and plug your filter & router into this - this isolates you from the extensions in the house. If the speed improves the you can determine it's your internal wiring that needs looked at which will be at your expense as BT won't touch that.

...

He might not have a two part NTE5 socket. My 70s house I moved out of only had a single socket full face plate (fixed plate). Funny though as my new house which was built in 1906 does have a nice new (well 10 years old) NTE5 socket. (See here for pics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telephone_sockets). If it is the old style you can usually unscrew the two screws and gently pull it away from the wall.Hopefully it should be obvious which is the master as it should have one of the wires running to the direction the phone line enters the house.

[Attila the Bun]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys.
I've speaking to a person in the know (my brother) and he has said just what you have.

ie:

Locate the master socket.
Carefully remove any extension wires.
Check bandwidth for improvement / signal for continuous activity.

If no I get no improvement he will pop up in the near future and put in in a new master socket and cable. After that I will contact ISP with the problem.

I'm going to change the ISP regarles of the result because I despise TISCALI / TalkTalk with a passion born of many many previous problems and their really awful customer services.

I'll probably get a new router as well...just because I want to : )

[MercutioUK]

Suggestion on this would be to take the front off the potential BT master sockets. Most masters are the split socket design with a lower plate secured by 2 screws. With this removed you should find the BT master socket (which the lower plate plugs into) underneath. Any extensions will also be wired into the circuit board the master socket is mounted on.

Gently remove any extension wiring (if you need to reconnect an extension the push tool makes it easy but its doable if a little fiddly with a couple of small screwdrivers). With extension wiring removed stick a phone into the master socket. If you get a dialtone this IS the real master. If not then the previous guy was a tool and was using BT master sockets for extensions (it happens).

Once you're down to 1 master socket with a dial tone it's up to you if you re-connect extensions or leave em out. Pop the faceplate back on either way and try and plug modem in here.


As far as getting internet around the house - homeplugs. I've used them all over and I now have stopped even eliminating them when trouble shooting network issues. A cheap set will do for most internet. Stick on in the wall near the modem, stick another in the wall where you need your internet.

This will LIKELY get your speeds up a bit at least.

[duc]

If you've always used the same router on several different ISPs, check that the MTU setting is correct.