Why I get faster connections in the West Indies than Suffolk

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

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. (more…)

Honey, I downloaded the internet

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

You really do have to be careful when you sign up to one of those bandwidth-limited ISP accounts. It might be cheap, especially in these financially tough times, but you must ensure you don’t bust your way out of your monthly limit and run up some huge bills.

Fortunately, I’m with an ISP that doesn’t seem to mind how much data I pull through the network each month. That’s within reason of course.

But at the end of the day, he knows I am limited by having two ADSL lines and that I am a fair distance from the exchange. Think 1Mb per line and you’d be about right.

So you will doubtless be as amused as I was to see this usage log from my trusty TZ190 Sonicwall firewall. Apparently my main desktop computer had managed to download 16,777,215 Terabytes of data. And it seemingly did that in just 5 days 9 hours.

Yah boo sucks to the Acceptable Usage Policy – I think I have a backup of the entire internet now.

No “up to” speeds with cable

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Recently I admitted defeat in a battle with unhelpful telecoms companies and jumped ship to cable, and I’m absolutely delighted with the results. The Virgin Media kit was couriered to me within days, easy to set up myself and required a simple two minute phone call to activate. But the best thing by far is the speed.

Used to the fluctuating performance of ADSL, my new service runs like a dream. It doesn’t drop out, it doesn’t slow down when someone next door phones a call centre in India, and – best of all – it runs as fast as it should.

I ordered the “Up to 4Mb” service and last night ran a speed checker: my download rate is a little over 3.8Mb/s. Considering that’s faster than I ever got at my last address from my “Up to 16Mb” Sky service, I’m absolutely ecstatic with the results.

Others out there may have had wonderful experiences with ADSL, others may achieve speeds close to those they were promised when they signed up. I personally haven’t ever got what I paid for from broadband, until now. In this house at least, ADSL is history.