Useless Internet...Grrrr

[macfanuk]

A bit of a rant so I apologise in advance.

About a year ago, we moved to a really nice housing estate in a quite part of town, with plenty of greenery around. When we moved in, we had our internet installed (All in one package with Sky) and were told we'd get around 1.5Mbps. Unfortunately, in reality, we get a maximum of 0.5Mbps which makes the internet virtually unuseable. Now, this is down to the fact that we are on the very outskirts of the BT Exchange capabailities and as such the line signal quality isn't very good.

When we heard about BT Infinity, we were sure that BT would upgrade the poorest quality exchanges first, which would make sense right? Wrong. Our town is having BT Infinity installed as we speak but our particular exchange isn't getting it until March 2012. Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it've been better for BT to upgrade the lowest quality exchanges first?

What's more frustrating is that Virgin installed cable half way round our estate then didn't bother to finish the estate so we can't get that either.

It's so frustrating that we're looking to move house. As a web developer, I find the speeds of the internet a huge issue. It's that bad that if we want to watch a 2 minute youtube video, we have to wait 5 mins for it to load and while it's loading, the rest of the internet virtually stops.

 

[Cooper]

Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it've been better for BT to upgrade the lowest quality exchanges first?

Not really, seeing as those with the worst connections now, will still have, relatively speaking, the worst connections after the exchange upgrades...

Think yourself lucky, TalkTalk wont even offer the service to its customers, unless they will get at least 15mbit, even if the exchange has been upgraded...

Luckily, when my exchange goes live, from April, i will go from 3.5Mbit to 28Mbit....

And anyway, if you rely on the internet for your living, then surely, the speeds you get, should be a factor in deciding where you live?...

 

[bigredshark]

When we heard about BT Infinity, we were sure that BT would upgrade the poorest quality exchanges first, which would make sense right? Wrong. Our town is having BT Infinity installed as we speak but our particular exchange isn't getting it until March 2012. Where's the logic in that? Wouldn't it've been better for BT to upgrade the lowest quality exchanges first?

Because the exchange isn't poor quality? Your line is. So you're asking for them to upgrade the entire exchange (that's the only option available to them) so they can fix the (small percentage of) poor quality lines on it (that is, yours)?

Every exchange has poor quality lines, it's going to be a fact of rate adaptive services, those closest to the exchange will always get faster than those at the far reaches and there will always be far reaches (except in very dense population areas where they run out of line capacity in a fairly small area and so each exchange serves a smaller than average geographic area).

Even when infinity/FTTC is rolled out those further from the cabinets, rather than the exchanges will get poor speeds.

Your line is bad, those closer to your exchange are likely as good as anywhere. They're not upgrading poor quality exchanges because they don't exist. What they could do is upgrade those exchanges will a high proportion of poor lines like yours first but I doubt they will, in their place I wouldn't, it's an extremely expensive roll-out, delivering service to those areas that are likely to have high takeup and are cheap to install will likely be the priority.

 

[KIA]

Move house.

Is the router connected to the master socket? Any extensions? Router stats?