For several years my home has been in the countryside in England and our phone line has therefore been an old one that hasn't been upgraded in a long while. Our broadband speed started out at about 5Mbps and sometimes dropped down to about 2.. Today it is at 20Mbps with no money spent or new lines installed.. Here's the epic saga of how!
If you have a fibre broadband connection then this post might not help you much, but if you are like me and stuck with a standard telephone line for your web connection then maybe this will change your internet experience for the better.
This all started about 18 months ago when our broadband connection started to fail. We had been told that we would only get about 5-6Mbps on our line - even though it was rated for 20Mbps - due to the dated nature of the system. Others in the area were getting less than 1Mbps in some cases so we thought that 5-6 was OK. In the process of debugging the disconnections we eventually learned, after calling out system engineers about 12 times, that there were numerous faults on our line that don't show up when making phone calls but which hugely effect the possible internet speed the line can handle.
If it weren't for the fact that I am a system engineer and use the web a lot, I probably wouldn't have bothered to push to have this properly investigated and I am sure that most home users of the web don't know enough about the technology to even know they should be pushing to have such issues resolved.
The British Telecom engineers visited many times - often totally contradicting each other and in one case storming out in a rage fit!! However, we eventually learned that:
- A junction in one of the telephone poles was broken and needed replacing.
- The local telephone exchange is really old and not cared for much - so the technology was not optimal and cables were even loose in there!
Eventually - 18 months later, we now have the fastest broadband connection ever (for us) and so far it is working very well.
This cost us nothing more than our time to persist and work with the engineers to resolve the problem. I did learn in the process that the British phone network is terribly run and that the various corporate entities involved are designed to give the impression of offering competition, but in fact they are mostly owned by BT. Some of them, on the phone, would even make disparaging comments about BT as if they were a competitor to them and yet I later learned that BT owns those companies too! lol.
Anyway, the lesson here is - if your broadband connection is crappy and you have a standard phoneline then make sure you explore the option of having an engineer check the line for voltage anomalies and see if you can get a 'lift and shift' done - which is where your line will be routed differently inside the local exchange, possibly eliminating problems that cannot be solved any other way!
Cheers!
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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