2 Mbps is not for three million homes
To follow up from my coverage of the Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, SamKnows and BBC News are reporting that three million homes do not have access at 2 Mbps or above.
What worries me, however, is that many homes which should have greater than 2 Mbps do not and it’s their own fault. I do broadband installation as part of my whole freelance techie thing as well as troubleshooting problems with it. It’s amazing how many people don’t wire their systems properly. One home I was at just a few weeks ago was achieving 1.5 Mbps and disconnecting often. Actual throughput was less than 1 Mbps.
When the actual throughput is less than the sync rate would predict (divide the sync by 9 to get the usable data rate, then multiply by 8 to get megabytes per second) it means a lot of errors on the line cause retransmission, thus slowing down the observed data rate. In this case, the DSL microfilter was plugged into the phone hookup for the Sky satellite TV box, so placing a phone device before the DSL device, absolutely verboten.
After I reorganised the wiring, the sync rate shot up to 6.2 Mbps with an actual data rate of 590 KB/sec. Service providers need to educate people better so that these elementary mistakes aren’t made. The DSL filter should be on the master socket or a filtered NTE-5 faceplate should be provided. Extensions done “properly” (that is, from the back of the master socket) are bad for DSL since they’re not filtered and so to make the best of a bad situation they should be filtered immediately on their socket.
Ask your neighbours how fast their Internet is or use the SamKnows Mapping Engine to query an average for your immediate locality. Remember that the average includes people who’re set up badly so you should be well above the average. My average is 3 Mbps, I get 4.5 – 5.2 . The average at the example I gave above was 5.0, they get 6.2 – 6.5.
If you’re significantly below what you should be getting, check your wiring. All lines are bundled so any problems with lines will be affecting your neighbours and the rest of your street too, too many people have said “Oh, my line is just bad” when it wasn’t. If the line really is bad, get a BT engineer out to sort it out. Be warned, however, that if the problem is with your wiring inside your home, you’ll be charged about £200. Make sure all your wiring is flawless first!