Getting a second line - need advice

Hello all!

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope this isn't a dumb question or easily answered elsewhere on the site.

Here's our situation - my husband and I moved in with his parents 2 years ago (our flat was sold by the landlady, we needed to save for our own place). Ideally we'll be leaving in another 3 or 4 years.

We live on the Crowthorne/Wokingham/Finchampstead border, in the middle of a wood, and have the World's Crappest Internet(TM). We're with Vodafone (just left Tiscali) and our line is 512kb. We're on the Eversley exchange which is about 7 miles away from here I think - the Crowthorne exchange is much closer and the other end of the road are on it rather than the Eversley one.

There are 3 online gamers in the house; me, my husband and the father in law. All 3 of us play during the evenings, the father in law is usually online from about 6am til 1 or 2am the following morning.

My husband and I are getting very frustrated with only being able to download things between 1am and 6am, on a line as slow as ours it took me 2 weeks to download a game from Steam. We can't open picture heavy sites during waking hours, god forbid we should open a Youtube video or have internet radio on, or we get shouted at from downstairs for the lag we cause.

We want to know if we can get a second line installed, that only we are on, so we can leave Mr Grumpy on the house line already present. We also want to know if we can blag our way onto the closer exchange in the hope of reaching the dizzy heights of a 1 meg line, or even :weeps with desire: 2 meg.

Can anyone help? Is there anyone who can estimate how much this would cost and what we'd have to do to start the ball rolling? We are so hacked off at the internet tyranny being practised here that we're consider offing him and sticking him under the patio.

Thanks!

Hevra

Other than having to pay for it, getting a second line installed is just a case of ordering it. New line £125 but there can be cheaper limited time offers.

As for the exchange, you cannot specify which one you connect to.

It might be useful if you can grab the exact line sync speed, attenuation and noise margin figures from the current modem. From looking at all the figures, people can often suggest whether there is something more to your slow speeds than being a long way from the exchange.

One option for just web browsing might be a 3G mobile data connection, leaving the 1st/2nd line for just the gaming.

RE finding your line stats as suggested by MrSaffron, see here for help.

BT run special offers now and again see this, you have to take other BT packages as well and don't forget there will be a line rental charge per month.
You also need to check and make sure you know how long the contracts are for before signing up for anything.

Calling Plans from BT > link

Plus you will be paying a monthly charge to your ISP once you decide who to go with.

The legal stuff re. calling plans and line rental

Line Rental Saver. Offer ends 29.10.10. Available to BT Calling Plan customers paying £113.88 for 12 months in advance by debit/credit card � equivalent to £9.49 a month (full price £131.88). Any additional charges to be paid by Direct Debit with e-billing. At least two chargeable or inclusive calls must be made per month (or six chargeable or inclusive calls per quarter) to avoid monthly charge of £1.50 (or a quarterly charge of £4.50) being added to your bill. Advance payment is non-refundable. Exclusions and conditions apply.

Standard Line Rental. Currently £12.79 a month with Direct Debit. Otherwise add £1.50 a month (payment processing fee levied by BT Payment Services Limited, a BT Group company). Discount appears as a bill credit. Set-up paper-free billing online at www.bt.com/paperfree

Unlimited Weekend Plan. Available for new and existing residential customers. No minimum term, unless you order a new telephone line or switch your phone line to BT from another home phone service provider, where a 12 month minimum term applies to line rental. Line rental payable.

Unlimited Anytime Plan � 3 months free. Offer ends 30.09.10. Available to new Unlimited Anytime Plan residential customers signing up for 12 months. Usual cost of Plan (£4.99 a month) payable from month 4. Discount via bill credit. Line rental payable. Cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer and may be withdrawn at any time. Exclusions and conditions apply.

Call Features at no extra cost. Customers must make at least two chargeable calls with BT per month, otherwise BT reserves the right to charge £2.59 a month for BT Caller Display or £1 per a month for the standard BT Answer 1571 service.

Friends & Family Mobile. Cheap call rates provide a 42% discount to Daytime pence-per-minute rates to UK mobiles (excludes roaming mobiles) compared with BT standard rates. A 9.9p call set up fee applies.

* Unlimited UK landline calls are for up to an hour to numbers beginning 01, 02 & 03, after which pence-per-minute rates apply. You can hang up and redial before the end to avoid charges. There are exceptions like calls to the Channel Islands. See our terms and conditions for details.

Inclusive calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers. Availability of inclusive 0845 and 0870 calls of up to 60 minutes duration (excluding indirect access numbers and dial-up internet access) dependent on residential BT Calling Plan: weekends only (with the Unlimited Weekend Plan) or any time (with the Unlimited Anytime Plan). Fair use policy applies � max. 1,000 mins or 150 calls a month. If either of these limits on free calls is exceeded, BT will charge for these calls until further notice See Terms & Conditions for full details.

When making a chargeable call, a 9.9p call set up fee applies.

Calls to 0871 numbers will cost no more than 10ppm plus 9.9p set up fee; Calls to 070 no more than 50ppm, with a maximum set-up charge of 50p. View full price list (www.bt.com/personal/pricing)

BT Basic. As part of our social responsibility agenda, we also have a BT Basic Calling Plan. You can usually get BT Basic if you're claiming Income Support, Income-based Jobseeker's Allowance, Pensions Credit (Guarantee Credit) or Employment and Support Allowance (income related).

From 1st October 2010, standard monthly line rental will increase by 50p (excludes Line Rental Saver); UK Daytime call rates will increase by 0.5ppm; The Call set-up fee will increase by 1p per call and Call Return features (1471#3 & 1571#0) will increase by 4.2p per use. Prices include VAT at 17.5%.

What exchange is the line you use connected to?
Have a look here

Edit > which ISP is providing the BB connection just now?

Edited by Apprentice (Wed 08-Sep-10 13:54:17)

Hi,
Getting a second phone line installed is fairly easy although there will be a new connection fee involved (BT charge is about £125, ours is £94) but you may also have a broadband activation fee on top of that as well to consider.

The other issue will be the chance is that the new phone line will go back to the same exchange, so you may be no better off unless your problem is a line issue.

As you have been asked the best way to get a handle on your problem would be to look at your line stats and also a copy of the text output that the BT speedtest www.speedtester.bt.com gives you as this will show us your current sync/connection speed, your profile and also the throughput.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

It might be useful if you can grab the exact line sync speed, attenuation and noise margin figures from the current modem. From looking at all the figures, people can often suggest whether there is something more to your slow speeds than being a long way from the exchange.

One option for just web browsing might be a 3G mobile data connection, leaving the 1st/2nd line for just the gaming.

Thanks a lot for the info - I'll get those figures once the hubby is back, I'm not sure what modem etc we have.

How would the 3G thing work - my set up is online game running on one screen with the second monitor for browsing. I'm guessing having two internet connections on the same machine at the same time is hard work?

In reply to a post by Apprentice:

What exchange is the line you use connected to?
Have a look here

Edit > which ISP is providing the BB connection just now?

Our exchange is Eversley and we're on Vodafone ISP having given up on Tiscali.

In reply to a post by vivaciti:

The other issue will be the chance is that the new phone line will go back to the same exchange, so you may be no better off unless your problem is a line issue.

As you have been asked the best way to get a handle on your problem would be to look at your line stats and also a copy of the text output that the BT speedtest www.speedtester.bt.com gives you as this will show us your current sync/connection speed, your profile and also the throughput.

Thank you - I think we could cope with being on the same exchange if it meant that we could download things during downtime while we're at work or asleep - our major issue at the moment is we only have a 4 or 5 hour window to get all our downloading done, which at our line speed takes forever.

The speedtest thing - it's been running since a few minutes after you posted - this is what it says:

Testing - Please wait...

The Performance Tester is now testing Broadband connection. Your configured download throughput speed for this service is 500 k

Please do not move away from this page and do not start any other download activity on your computer.

How long is it supposed to take? Has it crashed? The 'results' tab is not clickable. Shall I restart?

Thank you to everyone who has posted (and thanks Robertos for the link)

Edit: spelling fail

Edited by Hevra (Wed 08-Sep-10 14:15:54)

Two connections on one machine is possible, but can be confusing.

Should only take a few seconds, the 500K configured throughput confirms your comment on speed.

We have to ask as some people get confused on the units, and post the wrong thing at times.

Next thing is the data from your local modem, but at a guess it will give an attenuation of 63dB or higher (i.e. in line with being 7 miles from the exchange)

As Andrew said the 500k is the bit we need from that test as at that level we have an idea on the speed you are getting.
Once you get the info from the router that can help us work out if it's just a long line and that that or if there are some thing that can be done to help the service at all.

Once think you could do to give us an idea on your throughput speed compared to your profile is to run a more basic speed test maybe something like http://www.speedtest.net/ and when you run that one it will give you a link, post that back here.

A 2nd. line is no problem to install. Often the phone cable to your home already contains a pair of lines and it's just a matter of connecting it up.

BT are currently offering to connect new lines for £30 as Apprentice pointed out. Ignore those who say it is £125'ish; that was the previous price. Indeed, if you take BT Broadband as well it will be free.

Pity you are on the Eversley exchange as that only has ADSL Max connections and you might consider going with BT to save that connection charge.

If you could wangle Crowthorne then you've got a much better choice of ADSL2+ LLU ISPs.

In reply to a post by vivaciti:

As Andrew said the 500k is the bit we need from that test as at that level we have an idea on the speed you are getting.
Once you get the info from the router that can help us work out if it's just a long line and that that or if there are some thing that can be done to help the service at all.

Once think you could do to give us an idea on your throughput speed compared to your profile is to run a more basic speed test maybe something like http://www.speedtest.net/ and when you run that one it will give you a link, post that back here.

Will do!

Here's the speedtest.net info:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/945360191.png

It says my ISP is BT for some reason; not sure why...

I chose Maidenhead as the nearest option.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Should only take a few seconds, the 500K configured throughput confirms your comment on speed.

We have to ask as some people get confused on the units, and post the wrong thing at times.

Next thing is the data from your local modem, but at a guess it will give an attenuation of 63dB or higher (i.e. in line with being 7 miles from the exchange)

No problem Andrew; I learned that the hard way after moaning to my guildmates about my '512mb connection... it's so slow!' ....I'm always getting my kb and mb mixed up!

Also, apparently I have geography fail too - I just looked up the exchange's postcode on a route planner and it's not 7 miles, it's 4.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

A 2nd. line is no problem to install. Often the phone cable to your home already contains a pair of lines and it's just a matter of connecting it up.

BT are currently offering to connect new lines for £30 as Apprentice pointed out. Ignore those who say it is £125'ish; that was the previous price. Indeed, if you take BT Broadband as well it will be free.

Pity you are on the Eversley exchange as that only has ADSL Max connections and you might consider going with BT to save that connection charge.

If you could wangle Crowthorne then you've got a much better choice of ADSL2+ LLU ISPs.

That's great info, thank you very much!

Is there any way to cheese our way onto a different exchange? Ritual sacrifice? Envelope stuffed full of non-sequential used tenners?

That shows us your speeds are in line with your profile so all we need now is the router stats then we can start to see if we can help.
If your line is 4km rather than 7km then the speed does seem slow but thats dependent on the route the wires take.

It will say BT, as Vodafone is a white label resell that is ran by BT Wholesale

In effect Vodafone is not an ISP to the same degree as say O2/Sky/TalkTalk

A cabinet stuffed with tenners maybe, an envelope would not be big enough

The only time BT might do this is if rebuilding networks due to some major incident or closing an exchange

Does the master socket, which is probably the one nearest where the phone line comes in, have a split across the front, and look as though the bottom half will come off if you undo two screws?

How many extensions have you got and do you use any plug-in extensions as well?

Have you got a Sky box and/or burglar alarm connected to the line?

Hi all,

Here are the stats from Kitz as requested:

Vodafone modem is DG834G

currently (19:40 9/9/10) comms details are

Speed 672kbps 256kbps
Attenuation 62db 15.5db
Noise margin 15db 7db

I hope these mean more to you than they do to me, hehe!

That should give more than 672K. At a guess 1.2Mb or so sync speed with a profile of 1Mb.

Still not enough to allow you and your F-i-L to both use it harmoniously.

A second line would hopefully give you something similar.


Have a look at some of the BT offers - you need to use them as the ISP but connection can be free provided you agree a specific contract duration

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

A cabinet stuffed with tenners maybe, an envelope would not be big enough

The only time BT might do this is if rebuilding networks due to some major incident or closing an exchange

Damn you, elusive lottery win.

Thank you anyway, at least now we know we're not going to get any better than we have right now.

In reply to a post by Hevra:

Hi all,

Here are the stats from Kitz as requested:

Vodafone modem is DG834G

currently (19:40 9/9/10) comms details are

Speed 672kbps 256kbps
Attenuation 62db 15.5db
Noise margin 15db 7db

I hope these mean more to you than they do to me, hehe!

Well, your line length is around 4.5Km if those numbers are correct, so it seems you were wrong about the exchange. You should get significantly more that 500K - more like 2Mb - so I guess you're on a fixed 500k service.

You should stick your phone number in here and see what it says: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

You may not need a 2nd line after all, but if you do you might as well get the best one for your needs.

Yep, I thought the village the exchange was in was further away than it is; I thought 7 miles, but AA reckon almost 4

This is what that link shows:

However, there is another service on your phone line (e.g. ADSL, LLU, DACS, etc) that would prevent you from ordering a new ADSL connection.

The following services are available in your location:

* BT Wholesale ADSL
* BT Wholesale ADSL Max

Please select the options on the left for more information about broadband availability at your location.

All of the suppliers it points me to say 500k is the max available

Well, apart from the ones that don't offer anything in my area.

Edit: spelling fail

Edited by Hevra (Thu 09-Sep-10 20:24:21)

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by Hevra:

Hi all,

Here are the stats from Kitz as requested:

Vodafone modem is DG834G

currently (19:40 9/9/10) comms details are

Speed 672kbps 256kbps
Attenuation 62db 15.5db
Noise margin 15db 7db

I hope these mean more to you than they do to me, hehe!

Well, your line length is around 4.5Km if those numbers are correct, so it seems you were wrong about the exchange. You should get significantly more that 500K - more like 2Mb - so I guess you're on a fixed 500k service.

You should stick your phone number in here and see what it says: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker

You may not need a 2nd line after all, but if you do you might as well get the best one for your needs.

A 500k service syncs at 576kbps.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

A 500k service syncs at 576kbps.

So how does she figure out what's holding the sync down? Is it a BT Speedtest to show the BRAS profile or something?

All 3 of us were online at the time if that makes any difference... hubby and FIL were in game, I'd given up due to constant disconnects and 3k latency

Well, as you can see from your numbers, your attenuation of 62dB should give a higher sync than 672kbps but your noise margin is too high at 15dB and this is probably why.

The upstream attenuation should be more like half the downstream rather than 15.5db so there may be an indication of a problem there. Also the sync speed of 256kbps indicates you're on a fixed product.

I don't think Vodaphone are a great ISP.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

A 500k service syncs at 576kbps.

So how does she figure out what's holding the sync down? Is it a BT Speedtest to show the BRAS profile or something?

Dunno at the moment . As you say, the 256 upstream is also wierd, but a fixed one would be 288.

Shall have to think a bit. I suspect the home wiring is a mess.

In reply to a post by Hevra:

All 3 of us were online at the time if that makes any difference...

No, it doesn't. The router syncs at its own speed whatever you are doing. You just affect each other's actual throughput.

A 15db noise margin is not necessarily high, maybe her line is prone to interference and in order to maintain stability, a 15db profile has been assigned by the dslam, it's quite common.

Hello all

Here is some more information:

Just to update figures from previously
currently (8:50 11/9/10) comms details are
Down Up
Speed 608kbps 160kbps
Attenuation 62db 15.5db
Noise margin 14db 7db

The BT engineer this week fitted a master socket & also a fixed filter box to the front of it, so we don't need the phone/modem filters any more.

We have one extension (to the main phone in the hall), & don't use plug in extensions as its not neccessary with cordless phones.

Hubby and I have just logged on, and the whole lot has ground to a halt. He has 5500ms, I have 4897ms, and FIL has about 3k.

BT came round this week to 'fix' it, but it's clearly not helping.

I forgot to mention, we are on wireless (FIL's idea...)

Cheers!

Without re-reading the whole thread, you mean you all connect wirelessly to the router?

In which case try just one connected wired for a few minutes, with the other two switched off. Just to see if that is the problem.

It's just me and hubby upstairs that are wireless, FIL is wired. I can't connect us via wire because MIL goes bananas at having wires flung out of the window and in through the bottom window.

I don't think that could be the issue though, (although it might not help), because it's not just us that have internet issues, it's FIL too who is connect via wire.

How is FIL's when your two are switched off?

He said it was OK this morning before we got up and logged on; the major dramas only surface when all 3 of us are active (which was what prompted us to look into getting our own line and leaving Mr Grumpy on his own one).

Just asked FIL and he says the line is more stable since BT came to fix it this week but is slower (although we have massive lag at times, we don't always drop connection).

The only comment I'd make is that while some suppliers will give you a free connection or a discount with a long contract, you might be better off with a one month one if the new line won't actually support ADSL at all.

Or, a simultaneous provide (line and broadband from same company) on the basis that if one fails, they both fail.

Otherwise you could find yourself even more annoyed paying for two phone lines for a year and the same broadband you have now.

Just because the current one does - just - support DSL - doesn't mean the new one will. On the other hand, the new one might just be quicker.

We abandoned ADSL as too slow (1.7Mbps) and use 3G all the time (2.7Mbps) so if you can get decent reception (ours is on Three) that could be your answer generally, but it won't work well for gaming (high latency).

OK doesn't mean much when you are talking latency in the thousands.

He could mean it is now 200ms or so, or 24ms.

If the latter, then the wireless looks to be the trouble. Have you seen HomePlugs?

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 11-Sep-10 11:59:46)

Well, we wouldn't be paying for two lines, just one - ours. The other line has always been paid for by FIL.

If we get a second line, can we have the access point put in up here, or does it have to be the same one as the existing line? Sorry if that sounds like a dumb question, but I've never done this before - and neither of us want wireless when we do.

When I worked from home once before, I had a line put in and the master was on the wall of the upstairs bedroom I was working from.

Though it's not what you want hear, the chances of getting the second line from Crowthorne are slime to sod-all. I was at a house that was fed off Eversley, and there was still an old defunct ISDN line from the previous owners which I proved still went back to a cabinet served by Crowthorne ... the punter tried, in vain, for several months to get a service from there, but every time she ordered, the CP said no. The ISDN had originally been built from Eversley, but due to line length, wouldn't work, so the engineers were able to reroute it, there being a pole served by Crowthorne just up the road. The punter didn't mind the number change, and all was well. (Things like this could be done in the 'old days' of BT ) Out of interest where are you in Finchampstead, exactly ?