Broadband Speed

[B Fraser]

I recently bought a house in which has never seen so much as a silicon chip. The location is some distance from the BT exchange and I have been looking at satellite services as the best speed predicted is 1.5Mb over rural copper which in practice, could have been a lot lower. I was pleasantly surprised to get 1.2Mb.

Minor miracles can be achieved by ripping out domestic phone wiring so an hour's work later and a visit from the friendly local BT engineer who moved the primary socket and fitted their latest gubbins with built in filters, I fired up the router in the new location.

3.8Mb !!!!!!! :D

[Milo Minderbinder]

the type of, and condition of, cable feeding your premises can make a major difference.
One local trading estate here is fed by an aluminium cable around 1.5km long from the nearest cabinet and the busineeses there are lucky if they get better than 0.5Mb. Total cable length is around 3.5km to the exchange (which should be OK), but the aluminium section simply carries too much noise.
However I got BT Infitiy installed at one of the companies last week and their speed went from 200kb/s to 15Mb/s. It looks - based on that one case - that the Infinity system may cope with aluminium better.

The flip side is that I know of one site, in a remote valley near Coniston in the lake district, fed by an overhead cable across the fell tops leading to an exchange something like 6km away, which get a 5Mb/s service. I can only assume that it uses a decent quality copper cable

[Mike-Bracknell]

I gained about 1.5mbit/s (on a 3mbit/s line) by replacing all the copper in my house. A lot of people don't know this and continue to blame BT etc when it's their shoddy wiring that's causing problems not only in their house but sometimes extending to the roadside cab.

the type of, and condition of, cable feeding your premises can make a major difference.
One local trading estate here is fed by an aluminium cable around 1.5km long from the nearest cabinet and the busineeses there are lucky if they get better than 0.5Mb. Total cable length is around 3.5km to the exchange (which should be OK), but the aluminium section simply carries too much noise.
However I got BT Infitiy installed at one of the companies last week and their speed went from 200kb/s to 15Mb/s. It looks - based on that one case - that the Infinity system may cope with aluminium better.

It's unlikely that aluminium is fed through the whole run, given that it's not been used in BT cabling for a long while. FTTC is only to the roadside cab, and then fibre from there to the exchange, but even the small run of aluminium to the cab would kill FTTC given the frequencies involved.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Mike
seriously, the run really is that long. I've had long discussions about it with BT engineers over the years.
Locally BT did a lot of very strange very experimental things and we're still suffering from them here
Other examples were the first fibreoptic trunking in the UK, and a hybrid prototype exchange which used strowger switches to set up digital lines. Weird

BT had an engineering lab locally - though local rumour had it that much of the work done there was into stuff now done at places such as Cheltenham. Guess thats another "fact" that'll never be confirmed