Should I upgrade?

My exchange has been upgraded to 21CN and Zen have contacted me to offer the chance to upgrade to "up to 16Mbps". The caveat in the email is that such an upgrade may result in a connection that is less stable, depending on the line (apart from stating that the speeds may not improve significantly).

Before the upgrade my router (BiPAC 7800N) was reporting the following line stats:
Upstream 448
Downstream 7424
SNR Margin(Upstream) 22.0
SNR Margin(Downstream) 3.7
Line Attenuation(Upstream) 20.0
Line Attenuation(Downstream) 42.0

Post 21CN upgrade, the stats are as follows:
Upstream 448
Downstream 8000
SNR Margin(Upstream) 23.0
SNR Margin(Downstream) 3.5
Line Attenuation(Upstream) 19.0
Line Attenuation(Downstream) 35.0

So the question is, should I opt for the upgrade?

Worth a look:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/21cn.htm

I confused by the before and after stats, particularly decrease in Down Attn. Are you saying they have moved your line from 20CN kit to 21CN kit but kept you on an "up to 8 Meg" ADSL Max profile?

If so, it's worth upgrading to "up to 24 Meg" ADSL2+ (ignore the "up to 16 Meg" stuff, it's just advertising rules). You will get about 10 Meg Down on the expected ADSL2+ 38 dB attn. and up to 1.3 Meg Up.

Yes, the downstream attenuation does appear to have improved following the change to 21CN kit. I certainly didn't make any changes to my router. And yes, as I understand it, I'm still on an "up to 8 meg" ADSL Max profile (that seems to be the gist of the email I got from Zen with the "up to 16 meg" upgrade/regrade offer).

Hence my post; I wondered with the improved downstream attenuation, and the 3.6 downstream SNR if the line was good enough to get a worthwhile ADSL2+ profile, and if the stats meant I shouldn't lose out on stability.

Yes, my estimates were with the usual 6 dB NM. If you can hold a 3.6 NM then you will get even more on ADSL2+, but you can only suck-it-and-see.

EDIT: It's even worth upgrading just for the better Up Sync.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Tue 26-Mar-13 20:42:03)

I was in a similar situation with speeds etc, the upgrade took me up to around 12 Meg from around 7, so well worth doing.

A word of warning though some modems are not 100% compatible with 21CN. I hadva bit of a problematic change initially and It took a bit of detective work and a week of problems before one of the zen tech boys remembered a similar problem another user had had with the same kit. Do some digging first just to check.