Improving Broadband

I also found that keeping the modem to BT fibre point cable short had a beneficial impact. I have a 0.5m RJ11 cable here, and run 40m RJ45 to my Router. My regular speed is 78mb/s download and 19mb/s upload. 

My BT hub thats about to arrive is an HH5,  it's a router & modem in one box & the RJ11 cable change I've done in this thread - with a HH4 - was in readiness for the HH5.      

My exchange will be enabled soon and I'll almost certainly be sticking with BT. I wish you well with the upgrade and look forward to reading your views on it.

Here, it's common to use coax cable (RG-6) between the entrance from the street to the modem.  The modem supplied by the broadband service accepts only a coax cable input.  This is likely because homes for 20+ years here have been wired with RG-6 for cable tv service, and it's primarily the cable tv co's who provide broadband internet here these days.  I'm guessing that 90-plus percent of homes don't have any cat-5 in the walls, although that's been changing a bit with new construction; virtually everyone relies on wifi.

I paid the local high-end hi fi shop to run RJ-45 in my walls for the hi fi, and I'm very glad I did.  The computers all do fine on wifi, as of course do the hand-helds.  But the NDS and Qute2 get ethernet cables all the way.

Hi Bart,  I was talking about the same thing with my buddy in Minneapolis last evening.  The difference is in UK & I believe most/all Europe is we use a regular telephone cable with an RJ11 plug.   The straight parallel wires pick up a lot of noise & are not suitable with high line speeds ( I should say capacity ).  The new cables I have are twisted pairs - like a 4 pin miniature Cat5  

That said we have one ISP who has ultra high speed cable/fibre (sorry fiber to you guys) in UK & they use coax to connect into the home & claim they can get 200mb/s - but I know they don't get that,  sometimes not even close.  

My 76mb/s gets turned on Tuesday,  but am expecting a few points less. 

To finalise this thread about a better RJ11 phone cable for the higher line speeds of ADSL & fibre optic (FTTC) broadband                        - the BT HH5 (ISP) broadband pack arrived & I installed it over the weekend,  but did not use the ISP supplied RJ11 parallel pair cable, instead keeping my new RJ11 twisted pairs between wall filter socket, UPS & HH5.  This morning the ISP made the switch to fibre optic.  All this happened to plan & was trouble free - apart from about 2 hours of running slow & intermittent.  

With the new twisted pair cables, using Ookla speed test over wireless & nothing else running the download speed is 75mb/s. To push the limits of the line speed I ran the speed test while a web video was running in another tab & the download speed dropped to 72mb/s.  Then with the temporary hook up of a 5m length of the old parallel pair cable it dropped to a variable 45 - 62mb/s.     This proved to me the value of the twisted pair RJ11 telephone cable.  

While I was making the install I tidied up the mess behind the NAS, UPS, Switch cabinet with some trunking & hung the SMPS power strip with Velcro contact pads  ............

Mike-B posted:

My BT hub thats about to arrive is an HH5,  it's a router & modem in one box & the RJ11 cable change I've done in this thread - with a HH4 - was in readiness for the HH5.      

Mike, 

did you have to pay for the new HH5, or did it come fee with your BT contract?

Debs

Hi Debs,  it came with the new Infinity contract.   

Mike-B posted:

That said we have one ISP who has ultra high speed cable/fibre (sorry fiber to you guys) in UK & they use coax to connect into the home & claim they can get 200mb/s - but I know they don't get that,  sometimes not even close.  

In fact the coax feed that VM use will go far higher than 200 Mbps.  It will handle several Gbps easily.  And the DOCSIS 3.1 standard which they use can easily send 200 Mbps along it.  VM are  currently offering upgrades to 300 Mbps to customers who are currently on 150 Mbps and 200 Mbps to customers on 100 Mbps.

There are a couple of problems though.  Many servers on the Internet, and/or routes to those servers get congested and so the throughput from them is much less than the local connection can handle.  And secondly when you start talking about 200 or 300 Mbps, the in home installation may well struggle to handle it.  I still have 100 Mbps from VM and most of the time I get about 90 Mbps if I run a speed test, but you wouldn't think it from the time it takes to download from some sites!

best

David

Mike-B posted:

Hi Debs,  it came with the new Infinity contract.   

Blimy! Not sure I'd want to sign up to a contract that long.

Not really wanting to get too involved on a bus mans holiday on this, but higher access speeds on contended consumer services are really optimised for peaky/bursty throughputs, sustained  throughputs tend to fare less well. The internet congestion affects all speeds and doesn't only affect high speeds... the Internet does not offer QoS so it is a statistical thing..affecting all speeds... Yes a remote server might have a session throughput limit by deign and so this may be deliberate throttling.. also deliberate throttling and shaping can help with a more effective throughput by the nature of how TCP works... these is common and very easily observable on commercial dedicated fibre accesses.

Also remember ISPs have their own part of the Internet within their autonomous domain with their own routers. This can get get congested and effect all that  ISP's  traffic before it routes off to the Internet peering interconnects  and I read perhaps VM have had challenges here. I know BT currently has plenty of spare capacity within its UK routing domain.

The other  big potential issue for higher speed consumer internet accesses is the power of the consumer router, and as speeds are increased the router can become a bottleneck. I guess most don't want a large router with its fan whirring away in the corner.. Obviously no problem in a rack in a coms room.

I know VM use their coax distribution, but I think if they could or were starting again they would now use fibre instead as there is effectively no bandwidth constraint of the access medium itself unlike coax  and twisted pair and fibre itself is cheaper.

Simon

Hi David,  VM is what I was hinting at in my post,  a buddy is getting in a twist over his sub (very sub) 100mb/s that should be 200 & as he moved to VM because of issues with BT,  I will be calling him later to rub it in about my rock solid new BT.   

I used to get a rock steady 150 plus with VM but over the past fourteen months I have been getting a monthly refund because there are so many users on the system that I struggle to get over 50.  I've had four different dates on upgrades that have failed to happen.  Rather amusingly my speed was recently increased to 200 for free, which is ironic because it stayed at around 50!  Very very irritating 

naim_nymph posted:

Mike-B posted:

My BT hub thats about to arrive is an HH5,  it's a router & modem in one box & the RJ11 cable change I've done in this thread - with a HH4 - was in readiness for the HH5.      

Mike, 

did you have to pay for the new HH5, or did it come fee with your BT contract?

Debs

Mike, thanks for saying.

My HH3 is 5 years old,  last time my contract was changed BT refused to update it free to HH5, but they are willing to sell me one for £80 if i want. [I declined]

I think the real reasoning is the very poor BT speed in this area, and having a newer home hub won't make that any different.

It just niggles me to see BT providing a super-fast broadband service to half the UK, and super-slow to the rest, and with the same rental fee price, in fact for all i know BT maybe charging us more around here for our crapy Broadband service : <

Debs

Debs, if you get a Superfast or VDSL service from BT then you will get a HH5 router as the HH3 Is only designed for ADSL. I get here if I am lucky 4Mbps on a rural broadband fro BT, certainly reasonably speedy (low latency) , but obviously throughput limited... If you have slow performance other than low throughput  I would check your local setup including wifi and telephone wiring... And/ or possibly get a more performant router..

Simon

dayjay posted:

I used to get a rock steady 150 plus with VM but over the past fourteen months I have been getting a monthly refund because there are so many users on the system that I struggle to get over 50.  I've had four different dates on upgrades that have failed to happen.  Rather amusingly my speed was recently increased to 200 for free, which is ironic because it stayed at around 50!  Very very irritating 

I sympathise.  I have basically ignored whatever VM offer to me since the time I first had 50 Mbps because the increase to 100 happened without me having to do anything and I would rather not swap my cable modem for a home hub to get anything higher.  

Mind you the old D-link router they supplied is getting prone to falling over, so I decided to replace it with an Apple AirPort Extreme, but my first attempt at installing that failed this morning when I found that although my iPhone 5S connected to it at about 16 Mbps which is about the same as with the D-link, my iPad Air could only manage 5 Mbps whereas it gives me about 50 Mbps on the D-link.  This was standing close by the router too.  So I'm not sure what is going on there! For the time being I'm back on the D-link.

best

David

Sympathy Debs,  have you checked with Open Reach when you are due to get fibre.    A friend of mine who lives way out on the end of a long overhead line was getting 2-4mb/s,  he was the first in my area to go fibre - about 18 months ago - & was delighted with the change to 32-34mb/s in one single upgrade.  

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Debs, if you get a Superfast or VDSL service from BT then you will get a HH5 router as the HH3 Is only designed for ADSL. I get here if I am lucky 4Mbps on a rural broadband fro BT, certainly reasonably speedy (low latency) , but obviously throughput limited... If you have slow performance other than low throughput  I would check your local setup including wifi and telephone wiring... And/ or possibly get a more performant router..

Simon

 

Thanks for the info, Simon

just done a broadband speed test and have 0.93Mbps

Our local exchange is doing the best it can.

I'll try uprating the cables on the home hub - which is plugged directly into the master socket [the only place it'll work]

and see if i can gleam an extra 0.01Mbp 

Debs

naim_nymph posted:

I'll try uprating the cables on the home hub - which is plugged directly into the master socket [the only place it'll work]  and see if i can gleam an extra 0.01Mbp 

Re: "........ into the master socket [the only place it'll work] ........."                   Does that mean you have some extension sockets around the house ???   if so the fact it won't work on it/them is indicative of the extension wiring not correct;  maybe incorrectly wired or a fault.   If that is the case the bad wiring attached to the master socket can drag down the master socket performance & BB line speed.    I used to have 3 phone lines for my home office phone, fax & telex,  the phone had 4 extensions sockets around the house.  When I retired I had it all ripped out & also the j.box to master socket cable replaced with the correct spec CW1308 tele cable.   That fixed a bunch of long term BT drop out problems & gained aprx 10% more line speed.   Might be worth considering a phone engineer to take a look.