stanhoe.org

Getting the best from your broadband

Since broadband in Stanhoe is expensive and often slow, it’s worth getting the best from your connection. The following sections will help to get you started if you currently have no idea of how to measure bandwidth or view your line statistics.

Check your download speed

The important figure here is your download speed, which in Stanhoe is usually in the range 1–4 Mbit/s (1000–4000 kbit/s). Upload speeds are always much lower, in the range 0.25–0.50 Mbit/s (250–500 kbit/s).

Troubleshooting your connection

If your measured download speeds are consistently low — below 2 Mbit/s, say — you may wish to take action. Before contacting your internet service provider, it’s a good idea to check your house wiring and the filters that separate the broadband and telephone signals. To do this effectively, however, you’ll need to know how to get some performance figures from your router.

This guide gives basic information for many common routers, and some good help with interpreting line statistics. If you have an instruction manual for your router, check this too.

The most important router statistic for our purposes is the “sync speed” or “connection speed”, which is measured in Mbit/s and is normally a little higher than your measured download speed. Find out how to display this figure, and write it down.

The next step is to disconnect your phone wiring and see if this makes a difference to your sync speed. If you have a modern BT master phone socket, this is easy:

1. Unplug everything from the master socket.
2. Unscrew the faceplate and pull it off to reveal the test socket behind.
3. Plug your microfilter into the test socket, with only your router connected (no phones).
4. Wait for the router to re-connect.
5. When all the lights have stopped flashing, check the sync speed again.

If your sync speed is now considerably higher than before, then your phone extension wiring is probably at fault.

Modern wiring requires only two wires for each phone circuit; older houses may use a third wire known as the “ring wire”, which can pick up radio signals that interfere with broadband signals. The easiest way to eliminate problems caused by the ring wire is to install a BT Broadband Accelerator. A better approach, though slightly more complicated, is to replace the faceplate on your BT master socket with a dedicated filter like the XTE-2005. While you’re about it, get a good-quality cable too.

If you don’t have a master socket with a removable faceplate, troubleshooting will be more difficult. If you have read this far, however, you will understand that low connection speeds are not necessarily BT’s fault — which is at least a starting point.

Throttling and how to detect it

You may have wondered why you need to check the router’s sync speed as well as measuring the download speed. The answer lies in something called your “connection profile”, “IP profile”, “BRAS profile” or simply “exchange throttling”.

Basically this means that if BT thinks the line is poor, it will cap your bandwidth at a figure that is much less than your current sync speed. If the sync speed increases, perhaps because you have fixed your extension wiring or a temporary line fault is cleared, it may take several days before you see any increase in measured download speeds.

You can check for throttling at the BT speed test website. This site is often unable to keep pace with demand, but if you can get it to work (try early mornings) it will tell you the current IP profile for your line. If this is 1 Mbit/s, for instance, then you will not be able to download faster than this even though your router reports a sync speed of 2 Mbit/s.

For a stable line, a typical test result is:

The red boxes show all three of the important bandwidth figures:

• DSL Connection Rate (sync speed): 3840 kbit/s (3.8 Mbit/s)
• IP Profile (speed as capped by the exchange): 3000 kbit/s (3.0 Mbit/s)
• Actual download speed: 2750 kbit/s (2.7 Mbit/s)

Note how the measured bandwidth is about 10 percent lower than the IP profile, which in turn is about 20 percent lower than the current sync speed. This is normal behaviour, but if the relationship between the three figures is significantly different, then you may have a problem.

Throttling should turn itself off once the line is stable. If your router says that it has maintained the ADSL connection successfully for five days, yet your profile speed remains much lower than your sync speed, then it is probably time to contact your service provider.

Where possible, it’s a good idea to keep your router switched on at all times, only resetting it when you need to try to increase the sync speed. If your line is throttled at the exchange and you keep connecting and disconnecting, you may never see the full speed of which the line is capable.

Routers for long lines

Some broadband routers perform better than others, and that can be especially true when the router is a long distance from the exchange, as is the case in Stanhoe.

One router that has an excellent reputation on long lines is the BT Business Hub, which is a re-badged 2WIRE (Pace) 2700 HGV. The Business Hub works fine with BT home broadband, and you can get a brand-new one from eBay for £10–20 including postage. BT Business Broadband customers get them for free, so there are a lot going spare. The Business Hub is not designed to work with non-BT broadband, but with a little trickery it’s possible to use a different ISP: instructions here.

The Thomson Speedtouch 585v6 also has a very good reputation on long lines, and is less likely to be locked to a specific internet provider. You may need to search on eBay to find one. The 585v6 has been superseded by the Speedtouch 585v7, which looks very different on the outside — I’m not sure whether this performs as well on long lines.

It can be done!

With care, you can get a good broadband connection in Stanhoe: see the screenshots below from a BT Business Hub.

A welcome sight: router management screen
showing a sync speed of 3.6 Mbps…

…stable for more than a month