Mortimer, Berkshire - cannot get promised connection speed

We moved to a rental in a rural part of Mortimer in Berkshire, 3 months ago. Our ISP, Plusnet, promised speeds of up to 8mbps. We have struggled to get half a meg. Plusnet insist it is BT's fault. What I'd like to know is; are there any others who live in or around Mortimer and are suffering with slow speeds? If we have to change ISP I would like to be sure the problem isn't going to happen again - if the problem is with the exchange then we are stuck with it I suppose, and will have to move house. We are about one and a half miles from our exchange, on adsl.

First step it to see what the underlying cause for the slow speed is:

http://maps.thinkbroadband.com/?utm_source=mainsite&...

Shows what speeds others are getting in the area. The biggest factor will be how far away you are from the telephone exchange which is on Victoria Road.

This can be checked by grabbing data from the modem, i.e. attenuation, noise margin and sync/connection speeds http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php has a guide for the most common devices. If you post those figures people can advise more.

Do you think you could post the connection speeds, attenuations and noise margins from your router please?

Also if you run the Diagnostic option of the BT Performance Checker and copy/paste the full contents of the two text results boxes, those might help.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 11-Jan-13 14:54:59)

Thank you - will try to get this info for you - and post back.

An ISP won't usually promise speed.
They give an expected speed
I was assuming that perhaps you were on 20CN - which is up to 8Mb but I see that you exchange is 21CN enabled
If you put your post code in here or click on the map what does it give as the result http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_mapping?o...

Edited by deleted (Fri 11-Jan-13 15:04:50)

I tried the link to routers - sadly ours - a Technicolour provided by Plusnet - is not listed and doesn't seem to provide stats.

Download speed was 472kbps this morning on BBC speedtest site. Streaming speed 492kbps. I can understand that without further modem info it's tough for you to give advice.

I checked on the link to the BT map given and the closest test to us gave a speed of 2.79mb, with speeds in the actual village at about 9mb. So it might be a case of moving up the road. What a pain that would be.

Even the map was useful though, so thanks for that.

Oldjim many thanks and I wish we had known about that site before we moved in.

I got this result from it:


ADSL available at ~5Mbps

Cable services not available

FTTC services not available

BT 21CN services available

Wireless services not available

To get the router stats read here http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,9615...

We need the info copied from those text boxes of the BT speed test, like I asked for. There's important stuff there, not just the speed.

There are a few things could be causing the problem you see, and this will tell us a bit about a couple of them.

Edited by RobertoS (Fri 11-Jan-13 15:34:00)

Roberto, the stats that I got from before I posted from the BT site are:

download speed (Mbps) 0.48
Upload speed (Mbps): 0.10
Ping Latency (ms) 43.63

Hope this is of help.

I had a call from Plusnet this afternoon (strange coincidence - just after I posted!) and they promise faithfully that they have fixed the problem. I did the test just now

and download is 4.72, upload 0.19, ping 39.50

This would suit us just fine - except, somehow I think that, as has happened so many times with them before - it will be ok for a few days and then will go again. I hope it doesn't.

Thank you for your info.