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)