Broadband speed problems?
Jack's Granddad
Thread Starter
Broadband speed problems?
Just a tale which may help anyone experiencing slower than expected speeds. My ISP has been Mad As A Fish for about a year now, initially on a 2 mb service. All was fine until this was subsequently upgraded last Spring to ‘Up To’ 8 mbs (ie broadband max) at which point speeds deteriorated to the point where I was only getting a frustratingly slow 134 kbs speed. This was apparently because the connection kept dropping and the equipment at the exchange automatically then dropped the download speed in an effort to stabilise things.
To cut a long story, once my kit had been eliminated by substitution, BT made many unsuccessful attempts to fix the disconnection problems, including six home visits, until they admitted that they were completely baffled. After a while I noticed that things became worse at around 5:30 pm every evening when my wife came in from work, shutting the front door fairly firmly and wiping her feet on the mat just inside. Following up on this the engineer rewired from the junction box on the outside of the house to the master socket avoiding the front door area and now (hopefully!) all seems to be OK with average speeds of just over 3 mbs which, as I am about three miles from the exchange seems reasonable. Max BB is much more sensitive to the quality of the wiring and clearly mine, which was about 30 years old, despite not having any obvious flaws was just not up to the job.
So fair play to both BT and MAAF, they both made every effort to fix the problem at little cost to me, with the latter even giving me a credit for the inconvenience. We’ll see over a period of time if the problem has been finally sorted but if anyone is looking for a new ISP I can recommend Mad As A Fish as an ISP if only for the helpful customer service.
Hope this is of use to someone on here.
To cut a long story, once my kit had been eliminated by substitution, BT made many unsuccessful attempts to fix the disconnection problems, including six home visits, until they admitted that they were completely baffled. After a while I noticed that things became worse at around 5:30 pm every evening when my wife came in from work, shutting the front door fairly firmly and wiping her feet on the mat just inside. Following up on this the engineer rewired from the junction box on the outside of the house to the master socket avoiding the front door area and now (hopefully!) all seems to be OK with average speeds of just over 3 mbs which, as I am about three miles from the exchange seems reasonable. Max BB is much more sensitive to the quality of the wiring and clearly mine, which was about 30 years old, despite not having any obvious flaws was just not up to the job.
So fair play to both BT and MAAF, they both made every effort to fix the problem at little cost to me, with the latter even giving me a credit for the inconvenience. We’ll see over a period of time if the problem has been finally sorted but if anyone is looking for a new ISP I can recommend Mad As A Fish as an ISP if only for the helpful customer service.
Hope this is of use to someone on here.
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Cool, thanks for sharing. As I was reading your post, I was also thinking - a lot of people are pretty lazy and tend to be pretty relaxed about the security of their wireless networks, so if you see a sharp speed drop and you have an unsecured wireless (i.e. not encrypted or you are not limiting access by mac address) you might want to check if your neighbours are piggybacking on your connection! Also, WEP keys are not difficult to crack (there are programs that will brute force it) so you might want to change them often or limit by mac address if you need to.
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