[Klug-general] What Broadband Package Do You Use?

[Kevin Groves]

Dan Attwood wrote:
>
> the only useful thing they reminded me off was that adsl isn't a
> guaranteed speed. does any one know of a way to get an estimate on
> adsl speeds - for example living in the middle of maidstone it's
> likely i'll get a good speed but there seems to be no way of checking
> without actually adsl installed.
Not an easy thing to find out. I have a friendly ISP at work who knows 
how to get into the BT wholesale system which is used for broadband 
fault reporting. It tells you lots of interesting things about the ADSL 
line which your router does not. Even when using that to try and work 
out the speed of a new line before it goes in (just give it a phone 
number) there is no way to get it spot on.

I have a lot of users in the middle of no where and just resetting the 
router gets a different speed each time. One of the best indicators is 
the downstream attenuation (might be that one or the line noise, it's 
getting late). The BT rule of thumb in there system is if it's over 60db 
then it's at the at the limit of broadband. I have a few at 65db+ and 
it's *really* flakey. Best is around 45db.

Most ADSL which is 8mb+ is rate adaptive and it depends very much on how 
many pigeons are sitting on the wire. Live near the exchange if you can 
is the only way to get good broadband.  It will be a *long* time before 
BT upgrade the exchanges for the 21st project of theirs.

Kev,