my fttc experience

[caledoniang]

hello all,
i've not posted in an age, well, not since having wild problems with my adsl2+ service just over a year ago. for a re-cap, the problem with that particular service was it operated at about 3 mbit when my adslmax had ripped along nicely at full speed.

so, when I got my email about fttc I jumped onboard very quickly and after purchasing my router from ebuyer (there's a quid off my next order ) a nice guy from bt arrived to install it the day the world cup kicked off. as an aside - when he arrived I asked him if he could change the location of my master socket from the bedroom to the living room and after a bit of discussion and him being satisfied that this did not constitute additional wiring, forbidden on his work request, he went ahead and made the living room point the master socket, disconnecting the bedroom one. it was at this point that he asked me if I had had much luck with adsl2+ before explaining that the brainiac who had wired the socket and extension had installed two masters, and not a master and extension, and that he thought this was probably why things had been so bad with my connection! argh. thankfully it wasn't I who installed them so I avoided 

so he installed my fibre and away he went after showing me on his cool 'device' thing that i had synced at 40/10 and the connection was rock solid, he also told me that if he had so desired it would be feasible to have my connection running at 100/100 as the cabinet is < 50 m from our flat and my stats were great. i did worry slightly, on reflection, when he attempted to demonstrate the power I now had by failing to get a smooth bbc hd iplayer stream to run on my laptop and told me it was because 'the connection is faster than the laptop's processing ability' which I doubted as although it wasn't bleeding edge hardware it had a dual core processor and 4 gig of ram, and at the time was connected via cat5 to the router. anyway, i was happy with it as it blew the dodgy adsl2+ right out the water.

fast forward a few months and with my nocturnal outings curtailed due to the imminent arrival of our baby girl i'm geeking about quite frequently, no great hardship mind  after souping up a variety of bits of kit one night i'm idly playing with the computer and end up doing a bt speedtest, followed by a load of other varietal speed tests. universally they told me i'm getting around 12 mbit throughput. after a bit of messing around email idnet to ask why, as i'm synced at 40, i only ever achieve a max of 12, and sometimes in the morning struggle to get 8 - again becoming slightly annoyed that i'd ever got rid of adslMAX. get increasingly annoyed with the whole situation especially as bt are seemingly allowed to change the goalposts - my profile initially said to be acceptable if it was between 13 and 40, and then when i started getting 8's, became 8 and 40! very helpful idnet, simon in particular feel proud here but you've all been great with me, suggest that the problem may lie with my router as it's no longer the one that they recommend and would I like to try one of the ones they now recommend. a day later the router appears and after plugging it in etc do some more testing - with the same results, except the wireless range has become worse (!), via cat5 although page loading times had become ever so slightly less. so, in a slight bit of a cream-puff I let idnet know and go about returning the router but decided to buy myself a new router anyhow - NETGEAR Wireless-N Router WNR2000, which I think is essentially the same as the idnet one but has 300 mbit n-wireless vs 150 mbit - based on the slight page load time difference, and the fact it was working a helluva lot better with my xbox than the G router was.

last weekend - new router arrives and as i'm connecting it up decide that maybe it's time to refresh my ancient mix of home-made, broken ended, supplied by virgin media in 2000, cat 5 cables with some new stuff. after a dusty and occasionally painful odyssey in the space below the floor of the flat I connect my 'server' to the router via the new cables. run a speed test, not a bt one cos it's desperate slow responding, and bingo 38 mbit down 8ish up! so, it would seem my pre-historic cables and the less than optimal original netgear combined to reduce my throughput to a crawl. it's truly amazing watching downloads come in at close to 5 mbytes/sec!

so, a great big thanks to idnet. if you're having problems, and regardless of what you think about your cabling, get a hold of some alternative cat5 and maybe a more modern router and try it out, it certainly revolutionised my fttc.

[Rik]

Thanks for that.  As delivery speeds get higher, cabling and router choices will become much more critical.

[caledoniang]

here's a random current speedtest

[Rik]

You're only going 10x faster than me.

[caledoniang]

[Anton]

I agree - and actually this is a bitter sweet moment. For years I've been advising friends not to worry too much about LAN performance via 802.11 as the WAN speed was nowhere near their real world LAN throughput.

Now that's all changed and choice of router is important!

I recently replaced my previous model Apple Airport Extreme (100mb LAN model) with a gigbit version and I'm glad I did because the old version can only cope with around 30mb on the WAN port. The new one can cope with around 60meg, but it's getting a little close for comfort!