3 - Avoid extension wiring

Posted on 16 Jun 2008 at 14:44

"Wiring is the number one connection issue," Matt Cantwell, head of product portfolio at Demon Internet, told PC Pro. "A lot of people suffer simply because of poor wiring in the house."

The standout piece of advice from all the experts we've spoken to is to plug your ADSL equipment into the master NTE5 telephone socket. Placing the modem or router on an extension leaves it at the mercy of the internal wiring and, in the same way broadband speeds decrease significantly the further your house is from the local telephone exchange, the same applies in your own home.

However, the master socket is often awkwardly located in the hallway or lounge, and many a domestic dispute has arisen from a desire to place in full view a wireless router that looks like the offspring of Metal Mickey and a Dalek, not to mention the NAS drives, games consoles and other devices that require a physical ethernet connection to the router.

Hooking your router to an extension socket is, therefore, often a necessary compromise. If you must use an extension socket, make sure the wire stretches no further than 3m, Cantwell advises. He also assures us that BT's broadband checker is now "reasonably accurate" and a good indicator of how badly internal wiring may be affecting your connection if your router is plugged into an extension. "If you look at the speed of your router and it's considerably less [than what BT's checker says], it's clear something's going wrong in the home."

If you're noticing a significant drop-off, check the extension wiring - make sure no tacks have been hammered through the cable, for instance. "If your DSL equipment is connected to the master socket then the quality of the cabling plays a huge part in the sync speed that can be obtained; the higher the quality cable the better," said Phil Long, Zen Internet's technical support manager. "Running network cable around your house can be simplest, but could be messy or impractical." Which brings us to...

Next: 4 - Tweak your Wi-Fi

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