Aye, CW1308 otherwise known as CAT3. Personally I'd use CAT5 or above for all cables as laying in cables is the hard bit and the cost difference is minimal.
To squeeze the last drop of bandwidth out of ADSL you want minimum interference from 25kHz up to 1.1MHz (or 2.2MHz for ADSL2+). Running your ADSL line through the house with all manner of bits of kit chucking out RF interference isn't going to help.
Neither would I.
That might be but it also acts as a "long wire antenna" for MF broadcast stations and other RF muck and injects it onto the line. If you plot the SNR from your router over time you'll see it get bad a night when the foreign MF broadcast stations start to interfere.
I'd fit an NTE as soon as possible and fit the router next to it then run ethernet from it to the LAN switch/firewall/server. I'd also play with different filters. I bought the ADSLNation faceplate to make things "tidy" but it doesn't work as well as the BT badged MF50 "soap on a rope" filter.
Yup agreed. 802.11g can work in limited circumstances, but tends to run out of puff. .11n gear is coming on stream now and is better, but there is still plenty to be said for nice old fashioned cable!
(just in the process of pulling 2000 feet of the stuff into this place!)
802.11g wpa2 for the wife's computer.
802.11a wpa2 for my laptop and media centre, etc. firewalled 802.11g WEP for my pda.
I also have a Netgear me102 802.11 in the shed connected over powerline stuff but I don't use it often as the powerline stuff only gives me 2M and I inherited a three dongle with 12 Gig to use in the next six months.
One or three lucky peopel up here will have FTTH this year. Community group laying fibre.
Chatting to an Openreach chap the other day (after he had been feretting about in the joint box below "our" pole and broke the ali cable connection for the ISDN). Seems the new dropwire No.10 they put in these days has at least a fibre in it. There does seem to be a bit of contention about getting FTTC and who is paying though.
to stir up a few conflicting opinions, but the key ideas seem pretty similar. I think some of the details are a bit location-dependent (and mine's a stupid layout of a house where nothing ever seems to be simple!).
I had seen the clarity pages on installing an NTE5 and that way seems to make a lot of sense. Must admit I'm a little reluctant to start taking a feed from the back of the old BT box I have, as I thought they might get a bit pissed if they saw it. It would make for the neatest solution though....and I could always blame clarity (though they are a bit equivocal on that topic), or (if done in grubby-looking cable for a short run) say it was already like that (the universal excuse).
I did try tapping up an Openreach man who was ferretting in a hole in our road the other day, to see if I could get a BT NTE5 but no joy. Funny how people don't seem so eager to catch a few quid the 'right way' like they used to - before long, the whole of society will become afflicted by honesty (MPs excepted of course).
Still...looks like it'll be a good bet to put an order in to clarity for a few bits. It's a pity these things aren't very available off the shelf anywhere locally.
Of course the wired/wireless debate will rage on forever. To date, I've been fairly happy with the old original (b-type) wireless, although I had to get the location right by trial and error. Now we're moving to 8 meg (from 1 meg) it might become more of a limiter but the new setup comes complete with a new wireless router (g-type). I'm sure it all depends on applications but the nipper's online gaming seems much more prone to network issues than my uses. One day, when we all have mega-giga-tera-bit connections, and watch 3D HD TV with smell-o-vision etc online, I'm sure it will be inadequate, but for now, I prefer the convenience of using my laptop wherever I happen to be, without worrying about cables. I shall probably put a network cable to a point behind the TV though, as that seems the most obvious place for any 'non computer' internet boxes.
I guess most of my concern is that, in wanting to run cables for my nipper's room (at least), I'll be doing a few things that are less easy to reverse than with wireless alone, and I want to give the whole thing the best possible chance of working optimally (so I don't have to change it all again!). Somehow, I've a feeling I might not acheive that in one go(!)
True enough. Mind your I don't know if you'd actually get useable ADSL on 5 kilo feet of overhead line mind let alone 16,000 odd for a three mile one. I suspect that it would be very router dependant and how good the common mode rejection is in a given router.
My 3 mile line is only overhead for the last 40 yds and the SNR difference between day and night is about 10dB. Giving night time sync rates about 4Mbps but daytime ones above 6 but they can't be sustained during the night so it tends to settle about 5Mbps.
Unless you are pretty close to the exchnage you won't get 8Mbps. Those magic 6pt words "up to" next to the 72pt "8Mbps", though I think Ofcom might have tried to stop that sort of advertising now.
I'd suggest there is a wiring fault somewhere, as at those distances you ought to be getting a solid 8Mb/sec sync speed. I'm 600 metres from my exchange as the crow flies, all underground bar the last hop from a pole, and I know the wire path is a bit longer and I get 8Mb/sec - just, but my neighbours get a much better SNR than I do, so I know there is a cabling fault somewhere - trouble is, it's the sort of fault you just can't get BT to fix )-:
I also have a friend who could literally throw a brick through his exchanges window, yet some days his sync rate drops to next to nothing which screws the BRAS profile for a while for him.
On the flip-side, I have a customer who is 800m from their BT exchange, over a busy road, and they're getting 22Mb/sec sync rate... Sometimes it's just not fair.
And while I want a long, hot summer, I know that in periods of dry weather, my line will deteriorate (as it has done in the past), so I suspect there's a junction box in the way that's a bit damp, and when it dries out, maybe something goes high resistance or has a diode effect...
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