[HLUG] Offtopic - How to get faster ADSL speeds

[Julian Robbins]

Hi

These days with faster internet, and ADSL for much of the county (not 
all though), the times of 56k modems seem a long way off.

But, living where I do, 3 miles from the exchange, I get at most 3.1 
MB/s out of mt 8MB/s ADSL Max.

Recently, I noticed this had dropped to only about 1.5 - 1.6 MB/s and 
couldn't work out why.

But then, I started working it out. Quite recently, I had to neatly 
bundle the modem cable together with the other nearby cables to to avoid 
a trip hazard, (My wife is becoming a child minder, so we have to be 
careful ...).

I remembered that when my ADSL worked best, the cable was just lying loose.

So this time, I unbundled the wiring ties, and bingo, the speed shot up 
to 2.7 MB/s , much better.

The reason this worked better is i believe that having the modem cable 
tightly bundled in with other power cables increased the crosstalk and 
introduces mains hum from the other cables. This degrades the Signal to 
Noise Ratio on the ADSL line, and thus slows down the speed that the 
modem negotiation reaches.

By testing the highest reported connection speed on the modem, I could 
test exactly where it was best to have the modem. As you may expect, 
about 6 inches away from any other live cable is best.

Interestingly, I tried the modem direct into the BT Master socket 
instead. Since the line is a bit shorter, from where I normally have it 
you'd expect better speed again ? Well, i would, but instead it 
plummeted it to only about 0.85MB/s ! Wow, what happened ? I run each 
test a few times to make sure its accurate. We have a suspected quiet 
phone problem anyway, so I think the socket is dodgy, I can't think what 
else it could be.

Either way, this shows the difference that your phone wiring can make 
with ADSL speeds, anywhere from 0.8 MB/s to 3MB/s for me. The 
theoretical max 3 miles from the exchange according to BT's website is 
about 3MB/s so i'm quite pleased with what i get anyway.

So, have a go at rearranging or shortening your modem cables, and move 
them out of the way of mains cables and see what happens .....

BTW I have a few Ubuntu 8.04, OpenSUSE 11, and Fedora 9 CD's in nice 
cases that I picked up from the LUGRadioLive event if anyone wants one .....

Julian