BT Wholesale Line check

Hi All,

Can anyone explain/help with this. I am aware that BT wholesale have a line checker which means you type in a landline number and get a potential speed prediction.

For a few years the line I have was a supplied as a business landline into my home with ADSL Max and the line checker always reported back potential of 8Mbs. (Indeed I am only 130metres from exchange.)

Realisabale download speeds have been consitently high as well (>7Mbs).

Okay so I recently left the company and took over ownership of the landline. The very instant I did this the same BT line checker reported that my line could support up to 6.5Mbs.

This confused me and several irate calls to various BT numbers (151, 150, 152 etc.) gave no apparent joy yet when I checked again the speed had magically changed again to 8Mbs. (Which it still is.)

I was lead to believe that the Line checker was not doing a live test but checking a database. The question is how does that database get filled? Is it by real line tests or by a person changing the values. Or is there a 'tag' (business/residential) that 'sets' the line value.

What I found odd was the instant the line changed from Bus. to Res. I lost the 1.5Mbs. (No delay at all!) If I hadn't have known the capability I would probably have accepted this 'throttling'.

I would be very interested if anyone can shed light on this process and particularly who to call should the same thing happen again, because the operatives above didn't have any idea what I was saying.

I do realise that a quoted figure of 8Mbs doesn't mean you will get 8Mbs because of overheads etc. (What a service you pay for a full pint but its only 16fl. oz.)
And I realise that high contention on the lines will impact realisable speeds during peaks. My suspicion is that the database is used to set the range over which the stability checking takes place and if this is artificially set low then the true stable capability of the line is never going to be reported.

regards,

bon98uk

The best advice is to ignore the checker because it rarely provides an accurate figure

I have never understood this "prediction" to have any connection with the real world at all, so I think it may be pure coincidence that your actual speed dropped at the time the prediction changed.

I haven't checked it in ages, but for a long time, the prediction for my line was that I would only be able get 1Mbs, and for a time, it was revised downwards to 512K!

Nevertheless, for the whole time I have been able to get 3-4Mbs. So it has no bearing on reality at all (in my opinion). It's only a ballpark figure of what you might be able to get, for people who don't yet have broadband. And it tends to be on the conservative side. If you are lucky, you might do a lot better.

Edited by TLM (Tue 06-Oct-09 18:45:14)

Urm - lost what capability?

Ignoring the checker, what has happened to the line sync speeds as reported by the router?

The checker uses , or at least used to use, both real line data (when available, e.g. line test data and DSLAM data) and recorded data e.g. post code info to come up with a prediction.
I guess as I dont know the full capability of the checker now, that by changing the line rental casued the checker to periodically resort to recorded data rather than real line data .
I dont believe the checker itself can influence throughput or IP profile but the reverse can happen, a low IP profile can affect the checker.
As for getting it updated/changed? Try your ISP but other than that no real chance.

Hi Andrew,

Report from the stats page of my router (NG834) gives

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 8128 kbps 448 kbps
Line Attenuation 19.0 db 8.0 db
Noise Margin 12.2 db 23.0 db

regards,

bon98uk

General consensus seems to be to ignore this check.

Yeap nothing has changed full 8Meg sync

What exact URL are you using to get to the checker? Many people access it through a non-BT Wholesale link, which means providers are putting their own take on the wording, and to manage expectations some say things like up to 6.5Mbps, where as others say should be 6.5 or better

Hi Andrew,

I tried most of them with the same result, I appreciate that there maybe differences so I used.

1) A checker on the ISP I currently use.
2) A checker on the ISP I am planning to move to.
3) The checker found on bt.com
4) The checker found on BTwholesale site.

They all gave the same answers both before and after the transfer.

bon98uk

OK so what probably happened was you had a low IP profile for a short time, during which time the checker was updated based on the current IP Profile, and that has stuck.

As others have said just ignore it, it does nothing to limit your actual speeds.

I wouldn't worry about what the checker says it's often out of day anyway, what matters is what your router connects at.

The checker says "up to 2.5mbps" for me but I connect at 8mbps