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…)

Britain’s scandalous upload speeds

Friday, July 31st, 2009

A letter to The Times this morning makes a spectacularly good point about British broadband. While the mainstream media has (rightly) been roasting the broadband providers for delivering only half the download speed advertised on the tin, “the real scandal is… that the upload speed may be only a thirtieth of this [headline download speed] figure”.

The Times’ correspondent is bang on the money. Ofcom’s broadband speed report claims that: “overall the average upload speed received by UK consumers is 0.43Mbits/sec, less than 10% of the average download speed”.

While that sounds a little sunnier than The Times man suggests, the report goes on to state that “even consumers on higher speed packages (20Mbits/sec cable and 16-24Mbits/sec DSL packages) receive an average of less than 0.7Mbit/s.”

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Why you’re better off on LLU than BT broadband

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

Ofcom’s latest research into broadband speeds might have been spectacularly indecisive on the surface, but when you start digging through the 113 pages of the full report, some interesting nuggets of information begin to emerge.

One of the most noteworthy of these is that broadband customers on local loop unbundled (LLU) lines – where the ISP has put its own equipment in the telephone exchange – are generally on much faster connections than those with connections delivered by BT Wholesale.

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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.

Why BT’s not the biggest broadband choker

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

The BBC is getting positively hot under the collar about BT’s “iPlayer throttling”. It’s nice to see the big broadcasters finally paying attention to the hidden chokes applied to our broadband connections, although readers of the Smash Your Broadband Limits feature on the cover of this month’s PC Pro would already have been well aware that BT Option 1 customers were restricted to only 896Kbits/sec for streaming video.

BT Option 1 isn’t the worst service when it comes to strangling connections, however. Not by a long chalk. Take BT-owned PlusNet example. Its “Unlimited” account offers a maximum bandwidth of only 256Kbits/sec from download sites during peak hours (6pm-11pm) while peer-to-peer traffic is granted a paltry maximum of 128Kbits/sec from 6pm-10pm. Try downloading a 1.5GB HD show from iPlayer during peak hours on that connection and it will probably arrive a couple of hours after you’ve gone to bed.

Other ISPs pull similar ruses (you can find out what your ISP is up to in this month’s mag). Perhaps now the BBC has taken an interest, we’ll get a frank and open debate about the murky practice of traffic shaping.

The Government’s giving up on rural fibre broadband

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Chancellor Alistair Darling’s pledge of £250m to help Britain achieve universal broadband might sound like progress – but it’s practically an admission that rural areas will never get high-speed fibre connections.

The amount of money on the table is derisory. BT is spending £1.5 billion on bringing fibre-to-the-cabinet to 10 million homes across the country, and BT is (so far) concentrating on urban areas where deployment costs are lower. Does the Government really think it can bring even 2Mbit/sec broadband to the whole of Britain on a sixth of the budget?

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Broadband-boosting iPlate now less than a tenner

Monday, March 9th, 2009

My blog post last September on the broadband-boosting iPlate generated huge interest from people looking for a cheap way to increase their internet speeds. The good news is that it’s now even cheaper. Last autumn the device cost £14.81 inc VAT and delivery. Now, it can be bought from for only £9.29 on Broadbandbuyer.co.uk, making it an even more tempting gamble.  

Why’s it a gamble? Because the iPlate won’t improve the speeds of every ADSL connection. Jonathan Bray and I both saw speed boosts of between 53%-63%, but unless your connection is suffering from electrical interference, it might not have an effect. Of the people who commented on the last blog post, four saw an improvement (one of almost 100%), one saw no difference and two reported actual drops in speed after fitting the iPlate (for reasons that aren’t entirely clear).

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Sunday evening – the new web rush hour

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

Few will be surprised by the new Ofcom research that reveals actual broadband speeds are less than half of those advertised by the ISPs. 

But the one big shock to come out of the detailed research is that the peak rush hour, when average web speeds slow to a crawl, is in fact Sunday between 5pm and 6pm, as we can see from the graph below. 

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The online exile

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

Stand still a second. Can you hear that faint whooshing noise in the distance? That’s your entire life jumping online, that is.

A child born today will more than likely have their entire existence uploaded: those cute thumb-sucking baby photos dumped on Flickr, the first steps on YouTube, school days on Facebook, teacher reports and grades on the new education database, university and job applications filled in online, death certificate filed on a website. (more…)

Yet another Ofcom own goal

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Ofcom is once again patting itself on the back for a job well done on its new broadband Code of Practice. “Which? magazine has hailed the code, which comes into force tomorrow, as a broadband speed victory,” the regulator’s homepage proudly proclaims. Utter cobblers.

Let’s look at the detail. The centrepiece of Ofcom’s Code is that broadband providers must “provide consumers at the point of sale with an accurate estimate of the maximum speed that their line can support.” Can you name me one major ISP that hasn’t already been doing this for months? BT has an online ADSL Line Checker that’s been spitting out this information for years.

Even then, knowing your “maximum line speed” is about as much use as knowing the top speed of your car: it’s utterly irrelevant. It’s the actual speed of the connection – what people will see in their day-to-day surfing – that really matters.

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