Slow Speeds since I got the 8meg Max service

[Lance]

Unfortunately it seems that LLU is going to be your only feasible option. I've said it several times before and i'll say it again: if only Idnet did LLU!

[Sebby]

If only!

[Rik]

One day, maybe. Even if they do, inevitably they would start with the conurbations.

[hairyman]

One day, maybe. Even if they do, inevitably they would start with the conurbations.

Yes Rik I guess that may happen , When I spoke to Ofcom earlier this month ref my slow net connection , they said moving to a LLu is the only guaranteed way to get a "change" in service levels , nearly always much faster, as based on the data they had, IPstream ISPs/customers were speed limited by the infrasructure not by the ISPs internal systems.

He also said they hoped the goverment would via a green/white paper expect the next major roll out of high speed internet via fibre to start on area not already served by Virgin and other fibre as there would be no point in duplicating fibre along with all the disruption( digging up etc ) . Existing fibre to near home systems would be expected to do as BT had to do now with their infrastructure ie they will have to lease space and capacity to others. BT and others will be given permissions to install fibre in areas not currently provided with the same.

I guess this still means it will go into areas already not provided with fibre and that means towns and cities first and country folk after hell freezes over? The nearest cable to here is eight miles away my town and the adjoining much larger one has none, but it does have 6 or 7 internet providers on the exchange compared to our three ( BT, Orange and CPW).

Hairy

[Rik]

Deep joy. 

[hairyman]

Speeds back to "normal " here at last!! Phew I was nearly getting excited with over one meg and I nearly had an attack when it once went up to 4meg!!
Still its all safe now , nearly back to 2003 speeds. Could some of the porn/gamers/BBCiers and video/CD pirates please do more so I can be safe at 512kbps rates.

Its hard work being 400yards from the telephone exchange with a 7616k sync and 6500k profile and 700k throughput. Think I will go down to the garage to fill up the car tonight and see if I can get away with paying 10p per litre for diesel and see what they say!

[Ann]

Mine's really bombing... 1556 here with a 7616 synch.  cr*p isn't it?!

[Sebby]

[g7pkf]

I guess this still means it will go into areas already not provided with fibre and that means towns and cities first and country folk after hell freezes over? The nearest cable to here is eight miles away my town and the adjoining much larger one has none, but it does have 6 or 7 internet providers on the exchange compared to our three ( BT, Orange and CPW).

Hairy

Your lucky i do not have a choice i too live in a village and the only provider is BT no llu (or sdsl), but if i lived 3 miles north i would be on the MK exchange with a choice of 9 LLU
companiesMK exchange

compared to my exchange

Soulbury

[Rik]

Plus the MK exchange wasn't cabled with aluminium.

[g7pkf]

Just had a look at the exchange coverage.

I am about 50 feet away from being covered by the mk exchange 

I live lust above the H (on the name SToke Hammond) on the mk coverage map.

[Rik]

A small drum of cable and you're sorted, Dean.

[Sebby]

Easy as that, eh?

[g7pkf]

Hmm thought i posted some links, Hey Ho.

Ive got the cable just BT get the hump if you mess about in the house, messing about with the main network they would get the right hump!!!!

[hairyman]

Hmm thought i posted some links, Hey Ho.

Ive got the cable just BT get the hump if you mess about in the house, messing about with the main network they would get the right hump!!!!

A"right hump" with BT sounds very nasty ( worse than that Russian website on strange farming practices)!


Yes I do have Orange ( activated early 2008?) at our exchange and CPW added on in October this year but both only have phone/bb and or mobile combined deals . I have two thirds of a BT year long phone  deal to complete so I cant go that route yet. I do hope 02 will activate as they only need a PAYG O2 mobile contract to add BB which I can OK. O2 are on three surrounding exchanges so there may be some hope.

My town has 6000phone lines I think so we are not that small the neighbouring town that has more LLu ( O2 Be , Sky, Tiscali, Orange, CPW that I know of) only has 11000 lines. The nearest cabled exchange area only has Orange and CPW as I guess other LLus don't wish to compete or more likely they have agreed not to compete as there has been no cable expansion around my county for five years only new roads on new housing estates in cabled areas have been added on.

G7pkf -- how about using yr radio skills to add a microwave link to a friend "over the border" in MKland to send/rec data. I know they do this in Scotland to send bb over and along "firths" between islands on an adhoc basis. ( I am G8 t f i first licensed in 1978?) it would be good for a trial anyway! I can supply 200watt 1.3ghz amplifier and receiver or 40watt at 2.3Ghz system that I used in the good old days when I lived on a big hilltop. Enough of the radio stuff.

Still the world goes on and at least current speeds are  better than dial up. Plus even at Idnets rates right now, BB is cheaper than 512kbps was when I first got it in 2003? when it was £23.50 a month plus I paid over £100 quid for activation then. Mind you my pay has been driven down over the years as employers and inflation have taken their toll.

Personally I would be happy to pay the same as I did in 2003 plus inflation for say 5Gbyte an month download if I got a stable say 7 meg minimum . Sadly this is not possible with cr*py BT copper aluminium that adds a few extra db of attenuation a year to my local loop and the congested network they own and operate either side of what is a fast ISP like Idnet.

Be seeing you.

[Lance]

A"right hump" with BT sounds very nasty ( worse than that Russian website on strange farming practices)!

[Rik]

The mind boggles.

[g7pkf]

Thanks for the offer, my take of south is superb, trouble is north i have afew houses and a railway line to contend with. and guess which way the mk border is

[hairyman]

Hi G7pkf

Rail lines obviously are big problem when electrified with all those ugly overhead cables. Don't modern overhead lines on rail carry 25kv ? Certainly good for a spark or two. I have a minor branch line between me and the telephone exchange but it is all diesel or occasional steam and all the telephone lines are underground below a road that travels under the line. The main line is also nearby but fortunately it is all diesel as well. I am surprised BT are allowed to put any of their cables within 5 maybe 10 metres of the HV lines.

 

[g7pkf]

They are probarly not.

But

they put ther cables there about the same time the exchange was put in (circa 50 years ago) hence steam trains only.

then electric trains went in-no problems to phones.

then adsl went in and the problem arose. now the question whos fault is it?

chicken or the egg?

bt or the trains?

BT state third party interferance.

trains state all our trains are within emf limits.

The whole village suffers but as ther are apx only 200-300 phone/adsl users we are on a loser, BT will not invest thousands on us, we are a minority of users.

so in other words tough on us.

[Rik]

It's one of those 'no fault' situations, Dean. No-one knew about ADSL when things were done, as a company, BT can't afford to spend money that they won't recover, especially when they are not obliged to provide ADSL. The only answer is fibre, and that isn't going to happen for a long time yet.

[hairyman]

They are probarly not.

But

they put ther cables there about the same time the exchange was put in (circa 50 years ago) hence steam trains only.

then electric trains went in-no problems to phones.

then adsl went in and the problem arose. now the question whos fault is it?

chicken or the egg?

bt or the trains?

BT state third party interferance.

trains state all our trains are within emf limits.

The whole village suffers but as ther are apx only 200-300 phone/adsl users we are on a loser, BT will not invest thousands on us, we are a minority of users.

so in other words tough on us.

Say 200 users on broadband at £15 per month = £3000 per month or 36K£ a year . What would moving a few cables cost. What BT wont do is spend more money than they can get away with at the current level of complaints. Most people on bb dont know what actual speed they get in reality, a pal of mine who is a very clever but non technical chap told me when I asked that he connected at 54meg as thats what his laptop says about his  WiFi system. I decided to explain later ! I did a Samknows check and where he is he might sync at 2meg.

Most of BTs cables will need replacing within a decade or so as not even the best quality cables survive fifty years. BT are suffering from chronic underinvestment like most of the UKs infrastructure ans example is in my county well over 1billion is needed just to make the road network up to to the minimun spec at the current spending and likely lifetime of works completed they are increasing the total bill by 8% a year. This means in less than ten years time the bill will be 2billion and thats at todays costings ie they are only spending half the amount needed to stand still let alone catch up with repairs alone ( no new build included). Profits usually go to shareholders and execs not down to investment , my aerospace based employer has some very good new test gear but lots of it dates back to pre-Concorde times .

  Its a difficult situation the one between emf/emp and interference to other services I remember when I was an active VHF radio amateur running high power ( 400watts / 56dBmilliwatt output into high gain yagi aerials on mostly 144 and 432mhz bands I found that even located in a village my transmissions got into "anything" with a transistor junction in it , ie even cassette recorders and alarm clocks burst into life when the diode junctions demodulated my signals. Needless to say my gear was fully tested and only transmitting where it should. This was before the days of PCs and the net as we know it now and I hate to think what it would be like now with dozens of bits of cheaply built electronics in every room of every house.

I am sure if I was still active as a radio amateur I could stop ADSL working for a large radius around here because as we know ADSL is easily disrupted as forcing high speed data in analog form down ancient twisted or often non-twisted pairs is at best a marginally possible idea. Using coaxial cable would work well though!??

ADSL as I understand it runs as a multiplexed signal over the MW frequencies around 1 Mhz the exchange transmits a analog signal to your home at around the 100milliwatt level and your modem talks back to the exchange over a smaller bandwidth at lower speeds at maybe 10milliwatts. These levels depend on the line length and are adjusted during the presync stage when one turns on yr router. Any noise near the hopefully twisted pair can interfere with this signal path and ordinarily all that would happen is you would get bad data and the handshaking/checksum bits would get the "lost in the noise data resent".

This should all be fine and say 10% lost data due to noise would slow speeds by maybe double that.
BUT what happens as I understand it is that the  rubbish IPprofile/Bras system sees these noise periods as a semi permenant feature and to avoid the slowing of the network as a whole with these resent data packets due to noise periods the maximun data rate is slowed to a level the software considers there will be NO retrys. I think?

As an analogy say you have a garden hose filling a bucket from a tap and you turn the tap on enough to fill the bucket in say 1 minute. BUT after getting ten bucket fulls of water you get a small kink( or a small leak I guess) in the hose that slows filling the bucket to every two minutes.  To recover the situation you might ( if you hadn't noticed or couldn't fix the kink or leak) turn up the tap to get back to the 1 bucket minute speed again. What BT do is to turn down the tap to cut your flow further to avoid wasting water? or building up back pressure. They do this and leave it turned back for a period of time,  rather than look at the current pressure/data flow to see if it is OK right now. I understand LLus don't use time based profiling and either accept the increased overhead caused by retrys or slow the data rate for a much shorter period of time probably measure in minutes rather than the days or weeks that BT use.

As to the expense of replacing or upgrading infrastructure do we wait until the taps runs dry the lights go out or the roads collapse before doing what we know is right?

Here endeth the lecture?

Hairyman

[Lance]

Amen

[Rik]

Shall we take up a collection?

You make a good point, Hairy, we are notorious in this country for not investing in infrastructure. London, with it's Victorian sewers, may one day come to regret that.

[hairyman]

Date 07/12/08 00:17:28
Speed Down 5158.79 Kbps ( 5 Mbps )
Speed Up 370.19 Kbps ( 0.4 Mbps )
Port 8095
Server speedtest1.adslguide.org.uk

Caught my connection unawares at gone midnight and got the best speed I have ever seen!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Over 5meg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I will see if it maintains that level during the early evening.

I got an email from IDnet to say that the BT escalation team had ordered some temporary adjustments at the exchange on Friday.

On this Monday they had also ordered some more work that sounds like "like lift and shift" , they will be  transfering me to another line card at the exchange.

I will see if that helps. I remain forever hopeful?!

Hairy