I want my street cabled now! :(
- Thread starter Stuff
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 20 Jun 2010
- Posts
- 3,251
That is the great BT farce; everytime i see the advert they are running at the moment about rolling out super, amazing, incredibly fast broadband i literally rant at the TV. They should not be able to air such marketting without adding 'service only available in a minority of select areas. If you live anywhere that is not a major city populous, your screwed'
Thing that annoys me is that it always used to be you paid more money for better speeds. Now that is no longer the case because the faster speeds aren't available in your area, so everyone sticks to the cheaper packages. So now the broadband companies are putting artificial low download caps in place to force people to pay more 
With my £5 a month Sky broadband, they helpfully upgraded the speed from 8Mb to 20Mb for free (the max my line can support is 3Mb
) but I can't easily download Mass Effect that I bought on Saturday on Steam because of the stupid 10Gb download limit (the game is 10.5Gb). So I have to pay more for the unlimited service either with Sky or someone else
With my £5 a month Sky broadband, they helpfully upgraded the speed from 8Mb to 20Mb for free (the max my line can support is 3Mb
) but I can't easily download Mass Effect that I bought on Saturday on Steam because of the stupid 10Gb download limit (the game is 10.5Gb). So I have to pay more for the unlimited service either with Sky or someone else
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Mar 2004
- Posts
- 3,589
- Location
- England
A mate of mine lives in a broadband not spot, right out in the sticks and his line attenuation was apparently 73db. BT stuck him on a fixed 512kbps profile but come night time it would go down and never come back.
He now has no phoneline or ADSL and uses a 3 3G dongle which runs at 2.5Mb. Rubbish for gaming mind, although he doesn't game so that doesn't matter.
One thing I will say is if you are unhappy with your speeds you can do something about it.
Have you removed the ring wire (orange wire) from the BT master socket or even better plugged your modem/router directly into the test socket behind the lower faceplate? I gained 3Mb by doing this, as have a lot of people. It's worth a go if you have phone extensions and has no impact on the phones at all.
What ISP are you with? Move to an LLU service if one is available even if it is talk talk. Talktalk seem to have improved dramatically recently, the service seems decent and the way LLU technology works means you are not subject to BT's nasty DLM system or Ip profiling. If talktalk is available but you don't like the sound of going with them then there are talktalk resellers, like Xilo, who have access to opal (the business side of talktalk) which means if something goes wrong you ring xilo, not talktalk or opal.
A line running LLU running on Adsl2 / 2+ on most lines will see an improvement in sync speed. Most probably gain an extra couple of megs. On a short line you will most probably go from 8 to 24mb.
Punch your number in the samknows.com exchange checker and see what it comes back with.
I also highly recommend plugging your router into the test socket if you have an NTE master socket. You may be surprised!!
One thing
He now has no phoneline or ADSL and uses a 3 3G dongle which runs at 2.5Mb. Rubbish for gaming mind, although he doesn't game so that doesn't matter.
One thing I will say is if you are unhappy with your speeds you can do something about it.
Have you removed the ring wire (orange wire) from the BT master socket or even better plugged your modem/router directly into the test socket behind the lower faceplate? I gained 3Mb by doing this, as have a lot of people. It's worth a go if you have phone extensions and has no impact on the phones at all.
What ISP are you with? Move to an LLU service if one is available even if it is talk talk. Talktalk seem to have improved dramatically recently, the service seems decent and the way LLU technology works means you are not subject to BT's nasty DLM system or Ip profiling. If talktalk is available but you don't like the sound of going with them then there are talktalk resellers, like Xilo, who have access to opal (the business side of talktalk) which means if something goes wrong you ring xilo, not talktalk or opal.
A line running LLU running on Adsl2 / 2+ on most lines will see an improvement in sync speed. Most probably gain an extra couple of megs. On a short line you will most probably go from 8 to 24mb.
Punch your number in the samknows.com exchange checker and see what it comes back with.
I also highly recommend plugging your router into the test socket if you have an NTE master socket. You may be surprised!!
One thing
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Mar 2004
- Posts
- 3,589
- Location
- England
I actually used to go to client who one day said do you fancy coming down at the weekend to help my son dig the edge of the gravel drive up. I said yes and we dug a 50m long trench to the bottom of the drive.
He had to then pay for Virgin to come and lay the green conduit and cable. As far as I am aware he is now on Virgin.
If there are CATV man hole covers in the pavement at the end of your private road go for it. Virgin should be able to hook you up aslong as you provide them a trench
What village of Cambridge do you live in?
Soldato
- Joined
- 27 Mar 2004
- Posts
- 3,589
- Location
- England
Depends how many phone extensions you have and how they are wired.
I have 4 and they act as big RF aerials. Fitting an ADSL nation faceplate was a very good 'mod' for my line, as was my netgear dg834gt running on dgteam firmware.
Currently @ 8MB in the country side of East Sussex - pretty good considering I am surrounded by donkey sanctuaries and endless fields.
Moving to London this wee with a 20Mb connection which will be a nice step up
However, I just tested connection at my new job
Moving to London this wee with a 20Mb connection which will be a nice step up
However, I just tested connection at my new job
Associate
- Joined
- 27 Dec 2008
- Posts
- 309
Went onto Virgin 50MB package last month, it's been fantastic.
We both have a hard life Rainmaker
I now will never speak to you again. that is just silly. I know someone who has 1.5GB/s going in to there work!!!
My parents got internet around 1996 on 56k. They stayed on this until I moved out in 2000 and moved to an area luckily that had NTL. Been with NTL/Virgin since then despite moving once (again area had cable) and been through following speeds on medium package 512kb/1mb/2mb/4mb/10mb and then upgraded to 20mb few months ago. I think I'm so used to always having fast internet that I would suffer if I had to have anything less than about 5mb.
Last edited:
On 8mb AOL which is pretty good, they upgraded me from 2mb for free which was nice.
Like lots of others here our house was new when we moved in ~10 years ago, A whole street full of new builds and no road surface for 1 year and they did not lay the cable. Now everybody pays for Sky TV and ADSL...
Like lots of others here our house was new when we moved in ~10 years ago, A whole street full of new builds and no road surface for 1 year and they did not lay the cable. Now everybody pays for Sky TV and ADSL...