Blighty's slow-crawling broadband streets revealed Dial-up speeds of 56Kbit/s may be a thing of the past for many UK residents, but some people throughout the land remain saddled with painfully slow internet connections, courtesy of their local broadband infrastructure. New research published by uSwitch has crowned a Suffolk town as having the slowest average download …
>average Uk is one third of advertised speeds
The BBC had a chart of advertised vs actual speeds - all the ADSL companies failed to live up to their marketing by a long way, the only one to come close to delivering their stated speed was Virgin.
I must admit that I really like their 50Mb service - handy for our many computers.
I wonder if anyone could invent a solar-powered and battery-backed wifi transceiver thing that could be attached to every telephone pole - it might allow our country to claw it's way back to decent coverage.
ttfn
Well a local village near me has a wonderful 14.4kbit dial up and BT have told them that their exchange will not be upgraded even to ADSL1
Exchange name: Plaistow
Exchange code: SDPLSTW
Location: West Sussex South East
Postcode: RH140NT
Serves (approx): 199 residential premises
8 non-residential premises.
Broadband availability overview
ADSL: No
SDSL: No
LLU services: No
Cable: No
Wireless: Yes
BT Wholesale information
ADSL status: Not available
ADSL Max status: Not available
SDSL status: Not available
21CN WBC status Not available
FTTC status: Not available
Wireless broadband availability
Now Wireless: Not available
Urban Wimax: Not available
Kijoma: Enabled
EMNET Notts: Not available
Orbital / VFast: Not available
Cable Broadband Availability
Virgin Media: Not available
Smallworld Media Not available
Plaistow does have broadband, just not ADSL.
You should be able to get 'wireless' broadband from Kijoma (I assume it is WiMax)
Not ideal being tied to a single supplier - but then much of the country only has BT* broadband so the situation is not much better!
* Even if it is re-sold by someone else, it is limited to BT Wholesale
there are LOADS of villages that have no broadband. Some have broadband but not enough pairs for everyone - DACS ahoy and they wont drop more cable. Luckily they are on the FTC trial (not the published *real* FTC rollout) so they will get decent internet eventually but with only 2 people laying fibre around E cumbria it will take some time.
A fair number of them could probably get a boost by sorting out internal wiring. I've been helping people with ADSL issues for many years now and I'd say that two thirds of speed issues have been corrected by disabling the ring wire and/or fitting a dedicated face plate.
That's one of the problems with self-install. I'd urge anyone getting what they consider low speeds to visit this page:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm
It won't get you into the superfast league but it will often change an unbearably slow connection into an adequate one.
Not just internal wiring. Dodgy filters are a well known cause. The worst being people who've had the same router since they first got broadband on a plane vanilla ADSL service, let alone ADSL Max. Some of these people have a router that won't do more than 2Mb no matter what the service. In many cases a firmware update will fix it, if you can still find the firmware for the aging router.
One weird example I have found is some older Cisco 800 series routers that will sync at the full 8Mb, but data throughput is significantly lower. Upgrading to the latest IOS and firmware will usually fix this, but I've found some where the throughput is still well below the synced rate. And before you ask testing with another (often supposedly inferior router) will give much better throughput.
The response I've heard from Cisco is usually that the ISPs kit at the headend is not compatible with the Cisco. Of course it couldn't possibly be the other way round and be the Cisco that isn't compatible with the kit at the head end could it?
Yup. Sounds like we're dealing with a company that has never heard of contention.
I'd actually like to have a shufty at the data. How many people on a street had to submit results before they considered the data representative? Did they consider the time of day that the tests were run to be significant?
a) Where is this 'street by street' information? Couldn't find anything on their site. Tiresome when companies with things to peddle provide headline-friendly press releases, but no substantial information behind it. Put up or shut up I say.
b) Use their 'compare broadband deals' thing. Put in postcode - it tells me that I'm on a boggo BT 8Mb exchange out in the sticks, with no LLU or other options. Then proceeds to list all the great deals that are "available" to me, nearly all of which are 20Mb/Uncapped ASDL2+ or LLU offerings which aren't actually available to me at all.
*They* already know that, but of course *you* have to click through to the relevant supplier's site to find out the reality, i.e. you are going to be paying 3 or 4 times more for 8Mb/Capped deals. Not news to you or I, but the average punter is being seriously misled by this bunch of clowns.
Total garbage, the speed cited in Haverfordwest ignores a near neighbour who recorded a speedtest in excess of 5Mbps on the same u-switch site, and several others in the area on 3 Mbps or more. Clearly there is a problem with that one test that should have been buried in amongst all the higher tests taken in the same part of that town as it is NOT representative of the situation overall and is most likely down to a wiring issue for that individual customer - Im sure we could find someone in pretty much any street in the UK with abysmal performance, in fact - I have someone 2 streets away from me who records a 0.8 Mbps test while I record 5.3Mbps regularly.
Furzy Park is 1 mile from SWHV exchange, which has a WBC RFS date set (lucky them!) I know Haverfordwest, and in common with Pembrokeshire has been forgotten in the rush to give faster and faster speeds to the same spoiled areas probably bankrolled by the ludicrously high charges levied on old tech (long since brought and paid for) ADSL 1 exchanges.
Surveys like this distort the reality of things.
OK, so what are contention ratios like? You can see the effects in my neck of the woods.
I wonder when these places first had broadband? Is there some black box in the chain from customer to wider internet that just isn't good enough for current usage?
Whatever the cause, I hope this prompts the responsible telecom companies to check for problems, and fix them.
Useless bastards most of the time.
Overselling already congested areas, poor maintenance of local infrastructure (waiting for it to actually break down rather than engaging in preventative maintenance), pants customer care and a cavalier approach to dealing with reported faults.
'Our checks show your download speed to be within the limits of your contract sir'
'I never mentioned download speed, i referred to latency, what good is speed if the connection constantly drops and has over 40% packet loss?'
'Oh i'm sorry sir, our test show no issues, would you like to schedule an engineer call out for next week?'
'I'ts not an issue with my kit or connection, its your local infrastructure!'
'My screen shows no issues in your area sir, would you like to schedule an engineer call out for next week?'
:puts gun to head:
They are great aren't they.
I live in a block of flats, and last time it went down, it was an intermittent problem. down a few days a week, and always working when they came. Eventually some came when it was down... 4 sets of engineers turned up at around the same time cos everyone in the building had rung and arranged one... one set even turned up to do an installation, the look on their face was priceless when i asked if they had found the fault yet, as the whole building had been out for days. They had no idea and had been trying to get it working for over 5 hours :)
Luckily, somehow, one of the people had managed to get a real network engineer(I think through some previous issue, hanging onto a number they weren't supposed to have) who stripped down and redid the whole cabinet in the street and building. Strangely it has worked perfectly ever since
Being in a medium size Surrey village we have to rely on a single BT wholesale connection, which is fine most days - but every evening, when the village is using it to skype, or stream TV or play video games, the speed drops from acceptable to unusable. This situation will only get worse until the exchange gets additional choice for the backhaul, or we get fibre to cabinets
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I do wish Virgin would STFU. Their coverage is absolutely appalling. If other ISPs could concentrate on such a selective customer base I'm sure they could deliver the same sort of speeds as Virgin. Back int he days of Telewest and NTL there were plans to roll out cable to loads of new areas. Once Virgin took over the plans were shelved.
It's about time other ISPs started complaining about Virgin's advertising - for a start they could complain that Virgin's adverts don't make it clear that there's a damn good chance you won't be able to get the advertised service at any price. I've even seen their advertising in towns that they don't cover.
Its really annoying having slow adsl moved into a new house not far from the centre of leeds and i get 400k or so, When ordered they said i should get 1-3mb not great but usable. Best of it is ive since got a mifi dongle and that gets 4-5mb but im stuck paying by for a crap service. (to prempt anyone only things in the phone line are a filtered faceplate a phone and the bt supplied router. The main problem is the huge signal noise on the line but as its above the 256k min they have to provide im stuck shelling out for 18 months)
FTTC is not the answer to everyting that most people assume it is.
Although it may be available in a particular area you need to take the decision to move to it, it's not done automagically.
Many ISP's are using the excuse to offer this as as a premium service, or are still reviewing their pricing options on it, presumanbly based on BT LLU charges.
There is also the issue with the FTTC cabinet capacity, enough for the initial first adopters, howver there may be lack of capacity when it becomes more mainstream.
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