BT Broadband accellerator
 

Finally binned SKY and got a BT homehub today. Connection is slightly up according to a few testing sites and my ping is a lot lower on an online game I play. Only had it setup 6 hours though so it's early days.

Just ordered an accellerator thing which is free but postage added onto our BT bill. Its a plastic thing that slips under the faceplate on the master socket and apparently cuts out interference induced by the extension lines. The online reviews of this look too good to be true but then I noticed they were not in chronological order - all the bad reviews were on page10 and onwards. Thats on the BT shop website.

Anybody any experience of using one of these things?

Cheers.

I've seen mixed comments, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. You get the same effect by disconnecting pin 3 on the skt.

I'll give you the definitive answer on this as I have a professional interest.

If you mean the I-Plate then this is well worth trying. The device replaces the front plate on your master socket and incorporates a broadband filter at the earliest point in your domestic wiring. Not all master sockets are compatible but a quick google will sort you out.

There are other ways to boost your speed. Disconnect your bell-wire as mentioned by Green Granite however I can't remember the pin connection, it may well be #3 but google it. Connect your wireless broadband hub directly to the I-Plate. All internal extensions kill broadband speeds unless you have a decent quality twisted pair. The cheap stuff bought in Maplins, Tandy etc. is only fit for phones. Give your local exchange time to adjust to your new set up and the DSLAM will re-set to the new (hopefully better) speed after 48hrs.

I had 2 broadband lines at Chez F with one running at 7 Mb and the other giving a p*ss poor 400k. Both were served by the same cable however the slow one was routed around some very dodgy internal wiring. After doing all of the above, it rarely drops below 6.5 Mb. I'm not even in the same county as the serving exchange !!!!!

If you do all of the above and don't get a decent service after a week, drop me a PM.

Since I posted my original question I did a bit of googling and it confirmed that all it does is disable the bell wire which is now redundant.

Pulled out all the orange and yellows from pin 3 and hey ho...all my extension sockets run at only a slightly lower speed than my master test socket. (Have had to have router plugged into that for ages in order to keep connection, my master socket is through the bathroom in the boiler room which needs a rabbit-run power supply for the router to work.

I'm quite chuffed:ok:

Early days though...

Edit: Thanks B,Fraser:ok:

When I complained about my speed droping down from 7meg during the day down to 1meg in the evening the engineer fitted one of these for me (he said it wont cure the problem which is an exchange one but at least you got the best socket)

I just run a bit of cat5 from that to the router

your broadband speed is because of a number of factors, with the main one being the distance you are from the exchange.

Gosh, what a business.

None of this faffing around with a cable modem service, it just works.

This "let's try to bodge some high speed ADSL onto a Victorian phone line" nonsense really is the most horrendous engineering fudge.

Get a cable modem.

Us second class citizens wot live in the country don't have that option. :(

Us third-class citizens wot live in suburbia but neatly placed 3 km+ from the three exchanges serving the area - and no cable anywhere around - just have to put up with lousy speeds etc.

At least the nice people at Draytek have a special firmware for their fine devices that works over such lousy circuits.

I've seen some interesting press pieces recently about community groups wot live in the countryside who have clubbed together & sorted themselves out their own high-speed broadband. For a single person using radio or satellite is hugely expensive, but get a group of folks together & you can make it very cost-effective.

Might be worth starting a conversation in the local pub? You never know, you might start "Dog & Duck Broadband" with some help from the government's community broadband initiative.

There are a large number of factors with the internal domestic wiring being the most significant. Sort that out and you can make a huge improvement.

As I understand it, we (in the UK) will all shortly be paying a £6 a year "telephone tax" to provide "second class citizens" in rural areas with a spiffing high speed broadband connection.

SD

That shut 2 years ago :(

I'm reasonably happy with my 8Meg connection that mostly bumbles along at around 7Megs. But then I'm only a couple of hundred yards from the exchange.

Lifestyle choice, innit. Everybody I know who lives in a four bed detached house in a couple of acres in the countryside could easily afford to live in a one bed flat in the city.

Choose to live in the country, get a bigger house for the same money, get fields and cows and stuff to look at out of the window, but don't expect the same services you'll get in the city. Oh, and expect a lot of walking when the oil runs out or when private cars get banned for other reasons.

But at least I'll have space for a horse and cart. :E

Indeed we will.

BUT those rural hangers-on will have to pay about three times as much for their broadband as the city-dwellers under the Market 1 / Market 2 / Market 3 pricing rules. I know, cos I pay the "BT monopoly on the wires" higher price up in Norfolk.

Net net, the £6 a year for each landline is another tax - a drop in the ocean towards Gordon's vast and rapidly growing overdraft.

I bought one of these devices, hoping to improve on my dismal 1.18 Mbps line connection.

Waste of money. I got 1.18 Mbps and no phone. Or a phone and no broadband.

I live on the edge of Dartmoor, only options for me are SKY or BT. After a year with the "SKY experience" I'm willing to give anything else a chance.

BT are apparently introducing super BB through fibre optic. Doubt where I live will be considered for that though.

stumbled on this thread
 

try checking out solwise and adslnation shops, they have useful 'whitepapers' and such explaining master face plates and i-plates. Key thing is to know a) what service you have (fixed or adsl+), line attenuation (db) and noise margin/signal to noise ratio. Forums on thinkbroadband.com are very helpful. I live in the countryside (53db downstream attenuation), get 2Mbits/sec and they can stuff their broadband tax.

Hmmm, seems my tinkering and removing the bell wire and the subsequent dissconections whilst doing so have caused my IP profile to be lowered from 2000Kbps to 1500, now getting speeds of roughly 1.3M.

Reading about tells me I'm still in the 10 day test period and my IP profile should raise according to line capability. I rang BT and a nice Indian chap advised me to turn off my router every night and turn it on in the morning to reset my profile. This is in contradiction to everything else I have read - that doing so would lead the exchange to believe there was an error on the line, and thus reset my initial ten day settling in period and lower my connection rate???

I ran speedtester this morning and got the following:

Download speed: 1355kbps
Acceptable range of speeds: 400-2000kbps
DSL connection rate 3104kbps downstream / 448 Upstream
IP profile: 1500


Looking at my homehub linestats I get:

Downstream: 3104
Upstream: 448
VPI/VCI: 0/38
Type: PPPoA
Modulation: G.992.1 Annex A
Latency type: Interleaved
Noise margin (down / up) 8.4db / 18.0dB
Line attenuation (down / up) 54.1 dB / 30.5dB
Output power: (down / up) 4.9dBm / 1.5 dBm

Could somebody kindly explain in layman's terms what the above means and does my line look OK?

Cheers.

Edit> Just had a dissconnection and had to reset. Event log gives this:

Jan 25 12:16:19 2010( 169.230000) Admin login successful by 192.168.1.67 on HTTP
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: session completed successfully
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got empty envelope
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got envelope, len=0
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: InformResponse is completed
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: sending empty envelope to ACS
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: InformResponse
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got envelope, len=0
Jan 25 12:15:24 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:24Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got envelope, len=455
Jan 25 12:15:21 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:21Z cwmp: cwmp_session: sending envelope to ACS
Jan 25 12:15:21 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:15:21Z cwmp: session started event code(s): '1 BOOT'
Jan 25 12:14:51 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:14:51Z cwmp: mt_cwmp: session not established, will retry in 30 seconds
Jan 25 12:14:51 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:14:51Z cwmp: cwmp_session: session completed successfully
Jan 25 12:14:51 2010INF 2010-01-25T12:14:51Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got envelope, len=-1
Jan 25 12:14:51 2010( 81.140000) WGET: Error connecting to host https://pbthdm.bt.motive.com/cwmpWeb/CPEMgt (66.193.112.93:443)
Jan 25 12:14:29 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:59Z cwmp: cwmp_session: sending envelope to ACS
Jan 25 12:14:29 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:59Z cwmp: session started event code(s): '1 BOOT'
Jan 25 12:14:26 2010( 73.920000) RTNL: Received ERROR reply 'No such process' for message type 0x19
Jan 25 12:13:59 2010ERR 2003-01-01T00:00:29Z cwmp: mt_cwmp: session error: Could not resolve host
Jan 25 12:13:59 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:29Z cwmp: mt_cwmp: session not established, will retry in 30 seconds
Jan 25 12:13:59 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:29Z cwmp: cwmp_session: session completed successfully
Jan 25 12:13:59 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:29Z cwmp: cwmp_session: got envelope, len=-1
Jan 25 12:13:55 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:25Z cwmp: cwmp_session: sending envelope to ACS
Jan 25 12:13:55 2010INF 2003-01-01T00:00:25Z cwmp: session started event code(s): '1 BOOT'
Jan 25 12:13:38 2010( 25.950000) DVA started

Jan 25 12:13:37 2010( 24.790000) sys_if_stats_reset failed for atm0
Am I going to have the same snags as I did with SKY - intermittent and low connection?