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Posted on September 8th, 2009 by Jon Honeyball
Why I get faster connections in the West Indies than Suffolk
My tale of woe of ADSL Max lines rumbles on. “Max” appears to mean “maximum grief” – last week, I had five different engineers visit to poke at one or the other of my pair of ADSL connections.
Lots of hmm and humpf and hmmmm resulted. At the end of the day, the fault appears to be diagnosed as being between the exchange and the green box in the village. BT’s response was to offer me a choice – accept this new slower-than-a-modem speed as being “acceptable” or have the lines cut off. You can imagine my response. One engineer suggested trying a 3G modem stick instead – I was quite calm at pointing out that there is no 3G signal, only slow EDGE.
Fortunately, having the private mobile number of the owner of my ISP on my speed-dial enabled BT to reconsider the matter, and a “fresh” pair of wires were found in the bundling from the exchange to the green box.
This helped a lot, and now I have one line running at 1.5Mb/sec and the other at around 1Mb/sec. This results, through the magic of end-to-end Cisco load balancing, to equate to about 200KBytes/second real data throughput. Which is where I was some months ago, before water got into the lines (or a rat ate through the multicore).
This week, I am sat under a palm tree in the West Indies on a small island which is only a few miles across, has a smaller population than my next big village at home, and where everything goes slooooooooow.
The inhabitants are so laid back, they are horizontal – and “in the next five minutes” means “sometime this afternoon, but lets not rush things – have a cocktail in the meantime”. The crystal clear sea is trickling around my toes, and I have a Wi-Fi connection back to the beach house we have rented for a week.
And yes, I have faster and more reliable broadband connection to my servers in the UK than I get from the house on the Essex/Suffolk borders.
If this doesn’t strike our MPs as being somewhat odd, given that we are supposed to be in a Digital Britain where service provision is the only thing left (given the recent implosion of the financial services bubble), then there is no hope for us as a country.
I might just stay here – time for a swim, methinks
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19 Responses to “ Why I get faster connections in the West Indies than Suffolk ”
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September 8th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
And where we would be better off giving £25billion to BT, Virgin, GX et al and say “lay FTTH, and ncrease core capacity, by next year”, and have had more impact on the econimy than simply giving it to the banks.
Cue the naysayers who feel that 1mbit is perfectly adequate for everyone.
September 8th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Yes, icreasing the bandwidth will help the economy, think of all those hard drive sales to store all that porn!
September 8th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I agree with Alan, everything should be optically-fibred now, new wire “layings” should be exclusively fibre optics. Old lines have to be replaced gradually. That also sorts out the ADSL problem of speed decrease the further you live from the xchange.
September 8th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Have you considered sattellite broadband?
September 8th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
It seems a missed opportunity really. BT could offer you for a reasonable sum a fibre optic connection.
But what’s reasonable? BT would say £5000 a month, but in the US that would buy you ten times the bandwidth and cost half as much.
We’re strangled by the BT monopoly all round.
September 8th, 2009 at 9:58 pm
I had a client who was given a fibre connection by BT. It’s about 900 quid a month for 10 meg but the install costs are five or six grand, depending on how far you are from the last fibre provided site.
I haven’t been to the caribbean (I’d only be allowed to go for a month minimum, by Her Indoors) but I have sat at the cable-car station ont he top of Corvatsch, at 3303 metres, and had a faster 3G connection than I got in Enniskillen…
September 9th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Steve – was that in central London though?
I do remember Tesco in Beccles, Suffolk discussing something similar but at exorbitant rates.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Oh don’t tell me you took your computer on holiday too.
September 9th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
not quite Central, Nick, but still inside the M25… Rates do indeed rise as you move further out…
September 10th, 2009 at 7:33 am
I had a great time with this article as I read the topic extensively. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I’ll definitely be subscribing to your posts
September 10th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Jon, have you used the same ISP for both of your internet circuts in your load balancing implementation? Or have you chosen two different ISPs?
September 10th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I have been battling with BT on a similar problem. The advertised “up to 8 meg download speed” was downgraded to definately 3 MBPS, but I had 512 KBPS ( 1/2 MBPS ) to start and 66 telephone calls to BT Helpdesk in India and lots of “HMMMMMM it should work” from engineers, I am still below 1 MBPS.
September 10th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
My company takes in a number of expats from Portugal to work in UK. They typically rent flats while they’re here. They can’t believe a) the hassle they get from BT – who are usually involved somewhere in the mix and b) the slow speeds we have to put up with in many places. They tell me that in Portugal, even the meanest little village out in the sticks gets a reasonable broadband connection. From talking to so many, I don’t doubt that this is so.
September 11th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Steve – would be happy to be 5k. But BT wanted something like 30k. Plus 20k per year or so when we enquired a few months ago.
Alan — needs to be the same isp to send one packet down one line, then the next down the other, etc. Fortunately http://www.merula.net are happy to try such ip-trickery-pokery.
jon
September 12th, 2009 at 10:56 am
two suggestions. One: Virgin fibre based “cable”. Won’t release the need for another business-rated connection but will put the peak download rate up a bit. The other is to go back to BT and ask what happens if you go from a 1 year contract, to an 18 month or 3 year. Quite a lot of carrier kit amortisation turns into a whole different world once you get out of the short-contract mindset.
September 12th, 2009 at 10:58 am
oh and Mike: when I had a speed bump because BT closed the excahnge I was connected to, I was on the phone to Easynet a lot, sorting it out. After 2 calls I was talking to the guy who had been on-site in the exchange doing the LLU kit move, in the back of his car… there are good reasons to go for quality Tier 2 ISP’s, instead of BT!
September 15th, 2009 at 10:41 am
A shamless plug, but if you are closer to Essex than Suffork you have a WISP that may be able to reach you, us! We can sort you a 20Mb/s + Leased line if you need it.
Check out http://www.fastruralbroadband.co.uk for coverage.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Hi, sorry. I dont have a response to this post itself, i was just wondering if you are on Twitter or Facebook?
I was also looking for Derek Cohen, but he seems to have dissapeared?
September 22nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
Glad to read this post. Thank you for sharing.