New BT Infinity connection - what is its look & feel

Oct 10, 2013 90 Replies

Most of our total failures can be accounted for by farm machinery. :o(

The latest one being where something had run down the side of the overhead

20-pair that runs to the farm, stripping off all the insulation for several metres. A number of pairs were exposed to the air. It all still worked, except when it rained.

The previous couple of failures were caused by the combine driver forgetting to drop the lid of the grain tank before driving under the overhead to my house & bringing the lot down. When we had the poles replaced (woodpecker damage - yes, really) we had longer ones, so the combine can fit under the lines now. Until he buys a bigger combine, anyway. I've tried to buy the bit of land a couple of times, but he wants a ridiculous amount of money for it ... as he said to me, "where else are you going to buy it from?"

Nice graph and nicely shows how all ADSL variants become more or less equal at about 3.3 km (2.1 miles) or 45 dB attenutaion. Wonder if there is a similar plot for VDSL anywhere...

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7_521131-1.jpg Shows VDSL being no better than ADSL after about 1.5 km (1 mile).

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Has VDSL equal to ADSL2+ at about 1.2 km.

I think what he REALLY mnens is that 'ADSL will only do 20Mbps, and we can cover that on copper up to 500m or so, but VDSL does 160mbps and we can't get that above 100m or so'

On Friday 11 October 2013 11:43 Huge wrote in uk.d-i-y:

As you suurepticiously poured a large bag of sugar into his fuel tank...

It is amazing it works at all. What's your downstream attenuation?

Keep an eye on the "universal access" provision. That means that

*everyone* should have *at least* 2 Mbps by May 2015, oh sorry make that 2017 now...

There was additional funding (the Rural Community Broadband Fund) available for getting NGA (Next Generation Access - 25+ Mbps) into the 10% areas that won't get NGA under the BDUK/BT/Council contracts.

It's not often that the upstream is clobbered below it's normal 448 kbps. The upstream uses carriers with frequencies below that of the downstream so suffer much less from line attenuation.

Have you sorted out your house wiring? We did this:

1) Got the master socket reinstalled in the loft, and had just two lines run from that (one to where the router is).

2) Made sure the bell wire in each of these lines was not connected at the master socket.

We're about 1.5 miles from the exchange and that pushed our ADSL up from about 3Mbps to between 5 and 7.

The last time I had it measured (several years ago) I was told it was 47dB.

:-D

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Darren (on the downside, I have to live in Folkestone so it's not all good :-)

actually its more that the upstream is far less bandwidth than the downstream and is allocated 'good' channels first..

i.e. the ADSL spec mandates that up is fixed, and down fills all the rest, unless you come down to really low overall bandwidth, in which case you get reduced up, to allow any down at all.

Mine's 42.5dB, with a noise margin of 11dB, and 5.4Mbps. But I've seen it over 7Mbps and still working with a noise margin of about 6.5dB, so it may be possible to improve yours.

Correct - sorry for the confusion.

Your router should show this somewhere.

That is exceptionally low for such a long line. My old ADSL line was

5km long with 56dB attenuation.

Having your router near the master socket can help too, especially on longer lines.

Im at 57db or so and get 6Mbps. SNR 9dB.

Bastard. :o)

I looked at buying the Martello tower in Folkstone, but the vile housing estate (please don't tell me you live in it) around it put me off.

Did BT do that? If so I'm rather surprised as going into lofts could be considered "unsafe", anything from usinga step ladder to putting foot through ceiling. Of course if it's fully and securly boarded with a good loft ladder that's a little different.

Having it close to the filter might be more important. I don't think removing the internal wiring from the master socket to the modem here will make any difference to the speed.

connected at

See the recent CCS CW1308 thread. Not only did the CCS screw up the connection having the "bell wire" connected added to the degredation.

Also note the use of the singular for filter above. Have only one and my preference would be close to the modem but have no evidence that close or distant makes any difference. Normal house telephone extension wiring might mean that the filter has to be at the master socket, a single filter will be better than multiple and any star/stub extensions.

Experiment with filters as well, I bought a face plate one (ADSL Nation, had good reviews etc) to be "neat and tidy" but overall it was worse than the BT badged MF50 soap on a rope filter that came with the backup modem.

Rummage, rummage, rummage;

xDSL linestate up (ITU-T G.992.1; downstream: 1760 kbit/s, upstream: 576 kbit/s; output Power Down: 16.8 dBm, Up: 12.5 dBm; line Attenuation Down: 63.5 dB, Up: 31.5 dB; snr Margin Down: 9.5 dB, Up: 6.0 dB)

63.5 dB

Perhaps they said 74dB? At the time, it was too high to have BB - I was on ISDN for a while.

Speeds are a little higher than speedtest shows, likely because of overhead and "wet finger" approximations.

LOL. It didn't work at all with plug-in filters. We now have a filtered master socket and the router is right next to it.

I'll likely have retired and moved by May 2015. Definitely by 2017. Hopefully the provision in rural Dorset is better. :o)

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