steve's blog

We’ve had broadband in the house since September 2004 – nearly five years.

Because of the line length between the house and the Kincorth exchange, speed as always been an issue. Initially capped at 512K and then when BT lifted line speed limits up to about 1.5M – but very variable.

Imagine my surprise when I borrowed and old (and I mean old) ADSL router from Alistair the other evening, plugged it in and it connected at 2.5M.

My old Vigor 2600 seems to only support ADSL, whereas this NetGear DG834 (v1) supports ADSL2 and ADLS2+ protocols. Maybe that is what is making the difference.

So, all in all, until BT deploy fibre-to-the-cabinet here (maybe sometime in the next three years), I’m happy with the free upgrade.

Thanks very much Alistair!

Well, it is now one year since my 512K ADSL broadband connection was installed after several years of not being able to get it. Rapid, snappy internet access has just become something that we are all used to and all use every day. It was well worth the wait and I wouldn’t want to go back to life without it.

Well, I’ve had my 512K ADSL broadband link for a month and so far I am impressed. Consistently fast, always availiable (except one evening when the service seemed to be down) and no sign of any contention. Well worth the wait – although why BT couldn’t have rolled it out on the longer lines earlier is beyond me…

Finally after at least eight applications over three or four years I have a broadband connection and, yes, it is FAST

The BT man showed up for about half an hour, removed the Home Highway ISDN box and enabled broadband by about 1200. I got home from work and my router made a 256/512 ADSL connection but nothing would work. After about an hour I realised that I had made a really stupid config error in a routing table (don’t try this at home) and then everything worked fine.

Surfing is fast and I can now play media files without breakups. I was definitely worth waiting for.

Yeeeeha!

Guess what? No broadband today! 

I’ve just sat in for a couple of hours waiting for the BT Engineer. Called Eclipse at the end of my appointment window – "No sir, BT aren’t coming today – they cancelled the order last week as you are out of limits"

Apparantly Eclipse placed the order with BT too early so the old limits were applied when doing the line survey. Eclipse are going to resubmit the order and I should get a new conversion date sometime next week.

The annoying thing is that Eclipse didn’t bother to tell me that BT wouldn’t be showing up…

I’ve just received an email from Eclipse Internet to tell me that BT will be coming on Tuesday morning to remove my ISDN and install ADSL Broadband. The installation should be using the new Long Reach criteria so I expect it be successful – my line was last measured at 63 db against the old limit of 60 db.

BT today announced (http://www.adslguide.org.uk/jump.asp?url=http://www.btplc.com/News/Pressreleasesandarticles/Corporatenewsreleases/2004/nr0475.htm) that they have effectively removed the line limits that previously applied when testing lines to see if they are suitable for ADSL.

This means that from September 6th I should be able to finally get broadband.