can i pick your brains

Hi I'm with tiscali at the mo and have been having speed problems they say that my line will only support 512kbps but is running at 1mb which is limited. The open reach eng called to check the wiring etc and he tested my line to the exchange with the following results 33 db loss snr 14 speed 6592mb max speed 9020. BT line check says 512kbps, tiscali wont remove limit so cannot get to find out what the best speed is, all other suppliers say 512kbps so loath to move provider. Help i'm really, really confused.

1 live 1863 m from the exchange in a hamlet 10/14 houses all my neighbour have a download speed of 4.5 mb. All property buil in 2000 new underground cables however most of my neighbours are with BT. At times the speed is down to 350kbps but tiscali look is they might have sorted

If you can help or advise that would be great.

Which exchange? http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php

thanks Ive been on the exchange and sam knows says 5mb

Yeah, but which one?

Meltham exchange the Tiscali engineer (yes they sent 1 out) couldnt understand the problem either.

thanks for any help

Well, as the Openreach engineer says "33 db loss snr 14 speed 6592mb max speed 9020", your line is fine, it's just the BT database that's wrong.

Just migrate to ADSL Max with another ISP on a one month contract period to find out.

If by '33db loss' he means attenuation (likely) then your line is capable of a lot more than 512kb. That's slightly better than my line and I always connected at 8128 on ADSL Max. Now that I'm on Be I connect at 13.5Mb even though I've opted for a stability profile.

Andrue Cope
Brackley, UK

Just because he can

Edited by Andrue (Sun 05-Jul-09 16:57:10)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

If by '33db loss' he means attenuation (likely) then your line is capable of a lot more than 512kb.

Yeah, that's what loss means. That line can easily do 8Mb

Sounds like you may be on the old fixed rate service, i.e. fixed at 512, regardless of what the line can provide.

You could simply phone Tiscali and ask if you are on fixed rate or on ADSL Max, i.e. variable rate. If they don't understand the question then simply say you want to upgrade to their 8Mb service (which will achieve the same thing). If they want more money, then you may decide to change to another ISP at this point.

I had a similar conversation once with Pipex some time ago, the person I spoke to did not understand what products they sold. They are owned by Tiscali now.

In reply to a post by rbeal:

Sounds like you may be on the old fixed rate service, i.e. fixed at 512,

But it's running at 1Mb