Is this a reason for slow speed?

I thought I had posted this earlier, but obviously not.

Our BB has always been slow (best ever speed in last year has been 1.38MB, currently 0.35, as determined by the SamKnows box we have connected). Slow speeds are something we, in our area, live with as we are between 4=4.5 km from exchange.

However our speed is slow compared to other users in the area (mainly Sky users who seem to get between 2 and 3MB). I had assumed it was a contention issue, BT and TT having gigher contention ratios.

I have just had reason to go into loft to "top-up" the insulation, and in doing so traced the telephone line from where it enters the house to the master socket.

This was installed in the late 1970s, and it looks like the engineer who installed it used it as an excuse to use up all his old BT35a connector boxes and odd lengths of cable, as there are 3 connector boxes in the line.

Just wondering if this could be a contributing factor to our slow speed?

Cheers

Roger

In reply to a post by RogerE:

Just wondering if this could be a contributing factor to our slow speed?

Well with every connection joint you get a loss, so yeah you might be loosing some speed with each junction box.

If you do replace the cable you would need a CW1308 spec cable, or you could use CAT5e, CAT6 type Ethernet cable.

But be aware you are not really allowed to touch the wiring that goes into your master socket, any damages you cause touching that you are responsible for.

Paul

so basically I could run a cable from the outlet of the first connection box to the master socket, eliminating the other 2 connection boxes, or could loosen one of cables in one of the blocks and report it as an intermittent fault and get them to sort it out.....

In reply to a post by RogerE:

so basically I could run a cable from the outlet of the first connection box to the master socket, eliminating the other 2 connection boxes, or could loosen one of cables in one of the blocks and report it as an intermittent fault and get them to sort it out.....

Well the second way "might" work and I say might and is a bit iffy at the same time.

And the first way is a bit iffy, due to only BTOR are allowed to touch that wiring.
I have been lucky in the past when I re-did the entire wiring from the BT80 box and relocated my Master Socket.
Which BT were fine with for those times after a few mins explaining things to them and due to the line of work I did at the time.

I was then told not to touch it once I finished it, which I haven't touched it since.

Its all down to who you speak to, same with the engineers.

Also when my FTTP was installed here FVA (Fibre Voice Access) wasn't ready at the time of them doing the internal work so they left me the cable and said when its live just remove the copper line and connect the new wires going to the ONT (Modem).

So its yes and no to you are not allowed to touch their side of the wiring, maybe I was lucky the 3 times I touched the wiring.

TBH, I would wait to see what other people say on here before you go down the route you choose, my advice might be a bad one for you to go down and I was possibly just lucky.

Paul

Edited by PaulKirby (Sun 23-Jul-17 17:22:22)

Just wondering if this could be a contributing factor to our slow speed?

Could be, we need to see router stats to diagnose further and to see if any remedial work improves the connection.

Ian

Can you pop up router stats?

It will not be contention, plenty of users see 76Mbps at peak times on both BT & TalkTalk, slowdowns are extremely rare nowadays. It will be your line performance for one reason or another, assuming samknows is accurate.

Whilst not ideal, as long as each is a single pair to single pair connection it is unlikely to be the full cause of your slow speeds.

Now if there's wiring teed on in any of them, that's a different matter.

I am not sure if this is relevant but people have posted on here about getting their ISPs to send a "boost engineer" - if you could get them to come based on your poor speeds compared to neighbours then they ought to be able to work on that cabling to get it in a better condition.

Boost tasks are offered to all CP's via Openreach, but BT Retail/Business are the only ones who 'buy' in to it at present.

No the only connection is that wired to the NTE5 socket, and that was for an extension we no longer use - just terminated with an unused filter