Long line (10.32km)

Hi,

I've been trying to get broadband at my parents address for the past 5 or 6 years with no success, and we kept being told that its due to the distance from the exchange, The last time we tried (about a year and a half ago) there was 1 night we picked up a signal for about 2 hours only. then a few days later was told that it wasn't possible. This is where the problem starts, I have just recently placed the order again as I have been made away that a neighbour approx. 300m further away from the exchange is receiving a stable connection, however once again there is nothing at my parents. How can this be?

300m further from the exchange physically, might possibly be closer in terms of cable distance which is what matters. Without access to the line records for the area it is difficult to be sure.

Basically you are waiting on your local authority to meet the 2 Mbps USC obligation, and fingers crossed they might do super-fast for you.

Where in the country are they?
Postcode?

At that distance satellite or radio are the best solutions. If there are a cluster of houses BDUK should help but if a single house they may be one of the places not reached even by that money.

Some areas have grants to provide the initial connection for not spots (Wales is one)

Need to double check, but now the BDUK project in Wales has started have they ended their broadband support scheme

Sorry, postcode is BT602EN, its in Northern Ireland, and very rural too. As for the 300 metres further away from the exchange, I know the route at which the line goes as I have had a discussion with someone in BT wholesale head office about shortening the line by about 1km to 1 1/2km all for the sake of 1 pole and the wire to connect the 2 line (both from the same exchange and cabinet), but they said it still wouldn't guarantee receiving broadband (that's about 3/4 of a mile from the house and they houses there receive nearly 4Mb.

BT have passed it to the 2nd line team, lets just hope they're better than the 1st.

Thanks for all the replies so far.
Phil

You'd be lucky to get BB there at all:

In reference to www.dslchecker.bt.com/adsl/ADSLChecker.postcodeoutput:

For Postcode BT60 2EN

Available Products Downstream Line Rate(Mbps) Upstream Line Rate(Mbps) Downstream Range(Mbps) Availability Date

Featured Products
ADSL Max Up to 1 -- 0.75 to 2.5 Available
WBC Fixed Rate 0.5 -- -- Available
Fixed Rate 0.5 -- -- Available

As I say, over the last number of years I have tried with no success (except for a couple of hours 1 night), but when the neighbour has now got it and lives a further 300 meters from the exchange, I can't think of any reason why we can't get it.

In reply to a post by newwave19:

As I say, over the last number of years I have tried with no success (except for a couple of hours 1 night), but when the neighbour has now got it and lives a further 300 meters from the exchange, I can't think of any reason why we can't get it.

At some point in the network they may be on a better quality / larger diameter core cable, or just getting less interference for some reason. If it's 10km they aren't getting 4M but I may have misread that.

Do you have a new style NTE5 master socket where you're trying in the test socket and there's no dodgy wiring ahead of it ? There aren't any loading coils or other artefacts on your line and not theirs ?

Yeah, its the NTE5 socket, with an 4 cables going into the socket. 2 with orange on them connected to the faceplate, and the other 2 with green and black going to nowhere.

Nothing different on our line that's not theirs, the line comes up the road above ground, then at a pole beside the house it goes under ground for us, and continues above ground until my neighbours house.

My neighbour did say that the engineer was telling him that he was coming out to say it wasn't possible and that he was shocked he was able to get a signal.

The person getting the 4Mb is on a line of about 8km, but there is possibility of shortening the line for us at his house, and surely the signal shouldn't drop that much in 1km

4Mbps on 8km of phone line is still outstanding.

The by the book limit is that 6km gives around 0.5 Mbps.

if it doesn't work see if the engineer can get a sync up the pole before the underground - a damaged cable or incorrect wiring could be the difference.

ADSL is barely going to work at 8km in most cases, if you have very low noise levels by being out in the sticks and possibly heavier gauge cable on account of line length it can compensate a bit, but in general a 60 dB attenuation might get you around 2M and a 75 dB attenuation less than 1M and the difference is about 1 km.

Have checked the postcode and DETI knows the postcode as a slow spot using http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/ni/checker.php

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5452-northern-ire...
This should hopefully mean changes are underway, but with a 2015 deadline, you may have some waiting to do.

Current state of play
http://www.detini.gov.uk/deti-telecoms-index/deti-te...

Edited by MrSaffron (Fri 12-Apr-13 11:30:14)

The joy of Rural NI broadband! We always hear about the best broadband in the UK but it doesnt seem to get too far out of the town. My line is around 10km long from the exchange and 6km from the cabinet. I'm currently getting around 0.5-0.8mb with Talktalk on ADSL2 with a Netgear DG834g v3 which is double any of my other routers. Took a while but the line is pretty stable.
Have you had a look at North West Electronics wimax? I think they were supposed to expand to your area although they were supposed to be doing mine too with DETI money and nothing ever materialised. You seem to be stuck in the middle of three exchanges, do you know which one youre on? Doesn't seem too far to Markethill. Although Infinity isn't available you might be able to get the 5mb and up broadband with fibre from BT and Plusnet.

I'm patiently waiting to see the result of the DETI upto 2mb report and last resort is pricing up Fibre on Demand. Feeling your pain!

As in http://www.nwewn.com/coverage_maps.php

Seems coverage does not go that far into the south east corner

You could negotiate with BT for the extra pole and overhead wiring - but you will end up with bill for the work. A pole itself can cost £500 plus installation costs.

One solution might be to negotiate with the neighbours who get 4Mb - possibly piggy back on their connection, or have a new line run in to their house which you/your parents pay for. Then, find an appropriate directional Tx/Rx pair from Ubiquiti www.ubnt.com and install that as a wireless link. I believe that it is possible to directly connect the router to the Tx/Rx through Ethernet.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

As in http://www.nwewn.com/coverage_maps.php

Seems coverage does not go that far into the south east corner

Yes that map hasn't been updated in a while and there's another map under the DETI link which shows more coverage across the SE. My only concern is that the sales end seems a bit wishy washy on coverage and expects you to apply before they'll come out and see if you are covered, and this may be 12 weeks.

I haven't spoken to the people getting almost 4mb myself, but i'm going by this site... http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/speedtest/streetsta...

The map shows exactly where my parents live, and if you scroll to the right there'll be a house stating 3.8mb, that's the 2nd last house on that part of the line, but the line that comes to us takes a complete detour, and goes along the damoily road then splits at the crossroads with part of it going back towards that house as far as the seaboughan road.

I used to have a map with the whole route done in detail, but I think I've binned it.

BT were to ring today (after giving me a particular timeslot which suited with work, and were late as usual. Hopefully going to get to the house 300m away tomorrow and check the speed.

The down side of any point to point link is the need for line of sight with most of the cheaper products ubiquiti sell. That said a range of 50KM is nothing to be sniffed at.

Of course you also need someone at the other end willing to share their connection or install one for you

Post deleted by XRaySpeX

In reply to a post by newwave19:

and if you scroll to the right there'll be a house stating 3.8mb, that's the 2nd last house on that part of the line,

Just a cautionary reminder...

The uswitch mapping site shows the result of speedtests taken, but it locates them at the property closest to the centre of the postcode's area - not at the property that actually took the test.

The difference can be tiny in cities, where a postcode might be half a (small) street, but in rural areas it can be more significantly wrong.

If you put the address into the Royal Mail postcode finder, without the house number/name, it will report many properties, and may give you an idea of how extensive the area really is.

Had a look at that, and the houses on that postcode all start to move closer to my parents house, so there was only be 1 more house after that one on that part of the line and the rest would be on the same part as my parents.

as for the house 300m past my parents house, I was with them last night and got some stats of their line they only get 160kb, I know its poor, but its still better than dialup.

Noise Margin (down/up) 6.3dB / 6.0dB
line Attenuation (down/Up) 63.5dB / 31.5dB

Didn't get anything else though

I'd say thats a Netgear router misreporting the line attenuation. I'm getting about 0.5mb down with an att of 72db. Did you try ringing North West Electronics?

Most routers tail off the reporting of attenuation at 63 or 63.5 dB, so these values can represent any attn. above. This is for display purposes only; they still calculate using the true attn.

I haven't rang them yet as i'm waiting to see if I can get it sorted through the phone line as its only working out at £7.50 a month for them.

As for the modem it was a BT home hub 2

My Mum gets 2Mbps on her 10.62KM line. loss at 300khz is 70db ... so it is possible to get a connection on a ~10KM line.

Modem used is a Speedtouch 585 and I have actually set it back to default SNRM (used to use 3dB SNRM to get the best speed).

Do any of you get 3G mobile signal?

I've looked at coverage maps for o2, vodafone, orange and 3.
They all showed that 3G Might be possible but it would be a stretch apart from orange, t mobile & EE.

So o2 / vodafone / 3 might be worth a shot at trying.

I wondered if you had tried out different networks to see if any gave 3G?
In my old area it shows no coverage but I somehow get 3 bars of 3G on vodafone.

I can easily pull 1-3 Mbps on 3g with poor signal.

The best way to tell would be to test out all sim cards for all networks in an unlocked phone. See if any phone network gives some 3G signal. If it does this might be worth looking into. You can get sims delivered for free for each network to test with. You don't need to topup you just need to see if it gets 3G or not.

You can get routers that turn 3G signal into WiFi & you can place them in optimal places e.g. in a window facing towards the mast.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 15-Apr-13 23:27:17)

In reply to a post by 5km:

My Mum gets 2Mbps on her 10.62KM line. loss at 300khz is 70db ... so it is possible to get a connection on a ~10KM line.

But only if the attenuation is favourably low. In general the attenuation is at least 10 dB per km. Distance in itself isn't an issue. Less than 1M at 7km is another data point.

Post deleted by elevator

What was the talk regarding bonding two line?

BT have BET to combine two lines to make 1 or 2M available at long distances.

Any ADSL capable lines can be coupled together to increase speed with a variety of methods.

But if you can't get an ADSL connection over a single line you have nothing to bond!

If there isnt a second pair available this would also be an issue. If there is I would hope that BT have tried swapping them over to see if ADSL can get sync on the second pair.

Installing a new line could we a way out of this (as would satellite, wireless etc) but cost creeps in!

Mobile signals are out as it seems to be a not spot for them too. I used to work for a mobile phone retailer and have checked them all, and regularly do checks to see whether any 3g can be picked up on any of the networks.

I was looking at the BET comments there and that looks interesting, although is there any updated prices and all I can see is working out at just under £2000.


PS. engineer booked for next Wednesday, so fingers crossed

Cheers
Phil

yeap that sounds around right for BET.

the engineer was out today (well, 2 of them), first one done loads of tests, more than what had been done every other year, and couldn't pick up a signal. That's why she called the 2nd guy out saying that he's a lot more experience with the long lines. the only solution that he could come up with was where that our line was in the coil of lines a long the route to the house, that our neighbours is one that has no interference but ours must have. Surely this would then mean that there is a fault if the signal is being blocked??

Has anyone heard of this before?

Sounds like referring to crosstalk and this can be an issue as well as outside interference as at 10km the adsl signal is VERY low.

Is this a fault? No part and parcel of an rf signal sent down copper and thus performance decreases over distance

No worries. Thanks again for you're reply.....i'd say that an email to the ceo again would be pointless then.


Cheers
Phil