Is there any technical reason why broadband from say BT sgould be faster then broadband from say AOL? Or is it all down to geography? If I changed providers could it be any faster/better?
My broadband connection keeps dropping out, more and more recently. My neighbour is unaffected this way. Sometimes it's nearly as slow as dialup was. I live in a rural area, we only had broadband about five years ago.
I have AOL BTW. It's s**te. Don't buy.
Unless your exchange has any unbundled providers the speed you get from all ISPs will be identical as it thwy will all be using the same equipment. see the exchange checker here ...
Some ISPs have sharper teeth as far as persuading Openreach to fix faults, and improve service to the largest extent possible.
Switch to AAISP if you want world-class gnawing at BT's balls, but they can't turn 5 miles of damp mouldy string into 50 yards of gleaming copper or fibre.
Do not expect them to be cheap, but if you're not a heavy user, their revamped usage-based tariffs don't look as painful as the old ones.
That's no surprise.
That's no surprise either.
Maybe. The speed depends mostly on your distance from the exchange, though old wiring from the exchange to you can have an effect.
I use BT, in spite of the extra cost, because they can't do the buck passing that other ISPs have been known to try. *All* the stuff in the circuit is theirs, from the server to the router.
Some prefer cable companies,lke Virgin, and if you're in their area, it's faster than phone company broadband.
Ask for a line test, but be aware that if it shows your line to be clear, you may be charged for it.
Your neighbour's line might take a different, shorter route back to the exchange. Your line also might have a fault on it - have you tried a 'quiet line' test? You dial 17070 I think and listen to the menu.
Have you tried disconnecting everything and plugging the router straight into the faceplate at the master socket?
I'm no expert, but I was having similar problems, and found that replacing the modem/router provided by my ISP (Telecom Italia) to a Billion modem/router (5200RS) cured this problem completely. (I changed my Telecom Italia modem twice before going over to Billion.)
On the other hand, I had much worse problems in Ireland, and in that case my ISP there replaced the last section of wiring (from telephone pole to house) and that cured the problem completely.
There are two (at least in a simple layman's explanation) parts to broadband speed.
The first part is the physical line speed between your router and the exchange (I presume everyone knows how to DIY the bit from router to computer for best results). This is mainly determined by the length, routing, and quality of the wire, which is the main determinant of the signal to noise ratio - a router (and the dslam in the exchange) needs about 6dB of noise margin to recognise and decode the signals. Even at 6dB there will be errors, and than means retransmission and hence slowdown. This is the bit that moving from one ISP to another can't affect. Moving to a different supplier of hardware means you may get a better dslam in the exchange, but it can't do much about your bit of copper. 'Better' here means better noise discrimination, i.e. it can did the signal out of more noise. Cable is just a different bit of wire, and a much better kind all together.
The second determinant is what the ISP does with your connection, and here there is vast differences between them. The contention ratio is one thing that matters - how many connections share the connection between exchange and servers or how much bandwidth the ISP buys from your exchange to their servers. The speed of their DNS lookup system (you can use your own, and this helps), makes a difference to when pages first appear, but not to, say, iPlayer speed. Throttling is also an issue. I would be interested in scientific comparisons of ISP's in these respects, but I have not yet found one.
I buy a business broadband from TalkTalk Business, which seems to me much better than my neighbours, but then my bit of copper, or my router, or by chance the dslam that I'm on might be the reason. Although I'm a km further away from the exchange, I'm a km nearer the main road, so I might have less noise on my longer line than them. But I think that my 20:1 contention ratio is probably the thing, they are all on 50:1.
I'm sure that's mostly twaddle, but it's how I understand it.
R.
That's essentially it - when using the BT Wholesale network (and BT Retail are just one of dozens of ISPs who use the wholesale part)
So the bit between you & the exchange is usually "fixed" in that there's little you (or the ISP) can do about it - without BT Openreach changing the copper or doing a "lift & shift" at the exchange.
The next bit - over the BT Wholesale (BTW) network is also relatively fixed too - however from time to time, some exchanges do get more congestion than others.. One thing to note though - BTW offer ISPs 2 levels of throughput over this network - standard and elevated - this used to be 50:1 and 20:1 contentions, but they did away with that a few years back and now offer minimum speed guarantees for a percentage of time (it's something like 2Mb/sec and 3Mb/sec for 90% of the time respectively, no matter what your sync speed is - even up to 40Mb/sec FTTC AIUI) Some ISPs do not use the elevated services fron BTW (they cost more, obviously!), and still sell "business" grade connections - in this case, it's giving you more bandwidth rather than less contention over the BTW network. (So beware!)
Finally - the handoff from BTW to the ISP an this is where I reckon most of the slowdowns happen - the ISP doesn't have enough capacity, or they simply run a bad network.
The LLU operators are somewhat different - in that they cut-out the BTW part, but I don't think many of them have actually published contention ratios, etc.
There are other factors too - broken kit in the exchange, the dreaded "stuck bRAS profile" problems, but these are rare.
In general, you get what you pay for... An ISP offering services for £9.99 a month is very probably going to have a busier network than an ISP offering services for £19.99 a month, but hopefully the latter will provide better support, well-defined caps/limits and so on, rather than a "wooly" set of T&Sc and AUP.
Gordon
As others have said, it does depend on your ISP, as the ADSL connection from you to the exchange is typically over the same Openreach maintained route. Some ISPs are more ready to log a fault with Openreach and then to manage the fault intelligently whereas others seem to only act as a barrier to this part of the service. The ISPs, BTinternet, who are a separate company to Openreach, and AOL are in this second category in my experience. For an independent survey of ISPs, see
In my case, and others I've helped fix, the route for the ADSL to the exchange can have a mix of cables such as the old copper going to houses have all sorts of old, noisy equipment, the dreaded aluminium, installed after the War, through to newly installed copper serving new houses having modern equipment. Fortunately I wasn't on the aluminium but was on the old copper. My connection was intermittently bad causing a high SNR margin setting and slow speed and the initial visit by Openreach didn't find the fault. My ISPs (A&A) refusal to accept this got them to come out again for an extended test, checking or replacing all the components on the way to the exchange. As a result of this, my ADSL speed was almost doubled and the intermittent gone when they switched me onto one of the new copper cables installed for the new estate nearby.
Before logging the fault with A&A I had replaced my ZyXel router with a Billion and tested my end of the ADSL connection with the router connected directly into the "test" socket of the master connection with no "ADSL filters" in the circuit (they aren't necessary for an ADSL only connection, since they only do anything on the phones side). This eliminates all the private in-house wiring, which will be blamed if at all possible. When Openreach were on-site, I never let them connect my wiring to "check it out" since, once they do that, it is a chargeable call since they have worked on your part of the installation. I'd also got graphs of the ADSL performance when the intermittent was active, so could show the line deterioration.
You will find the ADSL link even goes down on a perfect connection where a link restart is needed, due to work being done on the exchange equipment or on the route to your ISP. This shouldn't impact your connection speed settings as the better modem/routers can handle these very quick disconnections whereas the older ones may need a manual reconnect.
You need to check to see if the ADSL connection is still working at these times. If not, that's a fault. It should work at all times and at a (near) constant speed.
That could well be nothing to do with your actual connection.
Some suppliers supply a router which is more tolerant of poor line characteristics. Or you could buy your own router.
Internal wiring can make a big difference; I installed a faceplate filter on the NTE for a friend this week and saw download speed jump from 2MB to 5MB
Owain
I am with Plusnet which is really good, it should be though as it is owned by BT, and my neighbour is with TalkTalk. She is always complaining that she could go to work, return home, put the kettle on, have a shower and her dinner before it connected. She has talked to TalkTalk who refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem.
Sounds like sort of speed of the old Sinclair ZX81's.
Have you checked your house wiring and had the bell wire removed (or sidetracked by using a faceplate).
Sorry, I don't see the connection.
Even if they use the same exchange equipment they can vary widely in speed. They can have different provisioning on the various links that can slow them down below the speed that the BT part allows. Different ISPs will throttle traffic in various ways, even the ones that claim not to (it is quite possible to throttle at the ATM layer for instance).
Yes and no.... ;-)
The sync speed (i.e. the number of bps the router reports) will be largely dependent on the distance from the exchange. You will get some variation with different hardware etc but not a huge amount.
What the ISP does with the traffic after that can make a difference - but if you are downloading at close to your sync speed anyway, a good ISP will not miraculously make that go any quicker.
Where you will see a difference is in the level of service offered, the speed at peak times and so on.
Sounds like you have a line fault. Does restarting the router fix it when its going slowly?
Indeed, it is, and I wouldn't!
As others have pointed out there are other issues that come into play as well as distance from the exchange incl.
Throttling ... unless you are on unlimited & uncapped .. you will not get full service
Contention ratio ... BT typically overbooks a DSLAM circuit by a factor of
20:1 on domestic use ... which really tells at peak times.IP Profile ... you may well have a service capable of for example 4Mbps .. but if the IPProfile is set to 2Mbgps that is the maximum you will ever get.
If you want to se what BT has set your IP profile to be run this test and look at the result text:
yes, and no.
yes, and no.
yes, and no
1/. change providers because: 2/. then get new provider to report line fault. With luck they will spa pairs till you get a decent signal.(I did this with a fault that seems to have been at the exchange: however on the way to proving that, i've doubled my speed. BT is not my ISP).
The yes and no is because there are two limiting factors to actual real world speed - one is the bottleneck caused by the actual line to the exchange and changing providers wont make that any better, though changing wires may. . The second is a function of how cheapskate the provider is at having other bottelnecks in their system.
+1 on Billion. Little known, but good stuff. Love mine. +1
same here..got a +5.5dB SNR boost following two visits by two engineers. Didn't fix the problem, but it was a faster problem!
>
I'd say Plusnet is good /despite/ being owned by BT.
[snip]
It does sound like a line fault. Get this sorted out first. There's no point considering other factors until this is rectified.
Neither would I.
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