BT Business Broadband

I have been thinking recently of moving from BT Business Broadband, organised by my employer to Virgin or Sky partly because of the TV bundles but more increasingly because of the poor performance and customer service of BT.

Just looking at my current BBand performance of my last three speed tests on this site my best was: 1.8M up and 0.44M down. This is poor when BT themselves actually say I could be getting over 4.0 M up when I put my post code in on their sites.

I have a Netgear DG834GT router and the performance figures on it are

2.27 M down 0.448 M up
line att down 44db line att up 26db
noise M down 11.3db noise M up 17 db

When I look at this sites perfomance map for my local post code area I can see that I am as close to the nearest exchanges as other people but my performance is 50% or more down on most of the other neighbours.

Do the figures above from the router tell anyone about the potential of my line for good or bad?

A BT engineer recently visited my house (while I was out) when I complained about the reliability of the BBand and he blaimed us for moving around phone extensions. This was rubbish as we have not touched the extensions for over 5 years or more.

Will appreciate any help or guidance!

rgds

Colin

With those stats you should really be seeing sync speeds of 6.5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. You say that the estimator suggests 4Mbps and your neighbour are getting twice your speed.

You may not have moved the phone extensions around but they could be the cause of your low speeds. Changing provider will not sort those problems out. I don't think the BT Tech would have made that comment unless he had good reason and most of them can just look at a socket or two and intuitively know if the wiring is good or bad.

Please do a daytime reconnection and read the line stats immediately afterwards. The high downstream noise margin is at least part of the cause, but without knowing what it is at connection time we don't know the next step to take.

Have a read of my Troubleshooting section, particularly the High Noise Margin and Miscellaneous Nasties pages, and see if anything looks likely.

have been thinking recently of moving from BT Business Broadband, organised by my employer to Virgin or Sky partly because of the TV bundles but more increasingly because of the poor performance and customer service of BT.

Two things to watch for here.

1) If this is arranged by your employer you should not be changing provider without their approval from both the business and IT sides.

I remember a while back when a major ISP blocked VPN clients from working on their cheap domestic service, and when users called to complain were told that as VPN was a business application they woiuld not be allowed to use it.

2) Changing ISP will probably not solve the problem for you. Every ISP will be using the same copper back to the exchange*, and any faults on this or on your internal wiring will remain, regardless of ISP.

*Unless in a cable TV area.

3) If your employer-arranged line is faulty, pass it to your employer to sort out. Let them do the shouting if they pay the bill...

4) Anyway, the downstream noise margin is high, we need to try and find out why. Follow the advice given by others here and report back.

5) Blind guess, but with a username of Beechgrove, are you Aberdonian?


Edit. That's more than two, isn't it?

Edited by shtu (Thu 13-Jan-11 10:05:24)

In reply to a post by MHC:

With those stats you should really be seeing sync speeds of 6.5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. You say that the estimator suggests 4Mbps and your neighbour are getting twice your speed.

You may not have moved the phone extensions around but they could be the cause of your low speeds. Changing provider will not sort those problems out. I don't think the BT Tech would have made that comment unless he had good reason and most of them can just look at a socket or two and intuitively know if the wiring is good or bad.

thank you so much for the last sentence, put a smile on my face that did. i have always known i was psychic lol

Thanks to MHC, RobertoS , shtu and Andyboygsi for the comments so far.

I will check out the T/S guide and the house extensions, some of them installed before I moved here more than 10 years ago! Will also try a reconnection and post back.

The name Beechgrove comes from the street I live on but just so you know I am an Ulsterman from Belfast!

Thanks for all your helpl

rgds

Colin

In reply to a post by andyboygsi:

In reply to a post by MHC:

With those stats you should really be seeing sync speeds of 6.5Mbps down and 1Mbps up. You say that the estimator suggests 4Mbps and your neighbour are getting twice your speed.

You may not have moved the phone extensions around but they could be the cause of your low speeds. Changing provider will not sort those problems out. I don't think the BT Tech would have made that comment unless he had good reason and most of them can just look at a socket or two and intuitively know if the wiring is good or bad.

thank you so much for the last sentence, put a smile on my face that did. i have always known i was psychic lol

Seriously though, after a few years you do get the gut feel about a customers wiring and whether it is good or bad. Certainly my TOs, S.Techs &c had that intuitive feeling about customer installations and even my L1s & 2s retained it.

Have done some more testing

I don't believe the reconnection of the router in daytime made any real difference to any of the previous figures.
I power everything off after I am finished with it...PC, router , everything is powered down. I have always done this. Is it better to keep the router permanently on?

I have looked through the T/S guide, and made some changes.
I rearranged all phone cables at the back of my computer so that they were as far away from mains and PS cables as possible and also made sure there are no neat loops.
I have also went around the house and unplugged a couple of unused phone extensions.

I then checked the speed again around 2pm today.
2.624 UP 448K down
line att 43 db down, 26 db up
NM 12.5 db down, 17db up
This did not seem to make much of a difference?

I also went to the master socket and may have found a problem!?
I removed the cover to reveal the inner test socket. I plugged a filter in to the test socket but was unable to get the router to sync on that filter position.
A phone also plugged into that filter position would not work.
But in this configuration I also found a hardwired extension from the master socket still working when a phone was plugged in, through a filter.
If I am understanding the T/S guide that is a no no??

I did not wire in this connection ( so it has been there over 18 yrs) and I am not sure if I can undo it, but I am willing to give it a try if possible.
This extension also happens to be the one upstairs that eventually feeds the study were my router normally lives!

Any ideas what I should do now?

rgds

Colin

Get a picture or two of the master socket especially the wires connected to te back - colours of wires and pins connected to are what is needed.

When you unplugged the small front plate, did you think to plug the phone into that to check for dial tone ? It has been known to be incorrectly wired that way !!!