Broadband Help and Advice
In our July 2009 show, Show 41, we looked at what's new with Broadband, and how to improve your broadband experience.
On this page, you'll find a link to the show and a full transcript.
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Listen to FrequencyCast Show 41 - Broadband in the UK
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Transcript of FrequencyCast's UK Broadband focus:
Carl:
So it's Focus time, and what are we talking about today?
Pete:
In today's show we are discussing all things broadband-related.
Carl:
Whoopee! Yeah - I love broadband. OK, so what have you got to tell me about broadband today?
Pete:
Now, we did discuss broadband back in show number 14 all those many many months ago.
Carl:
Am I experiencing déjà vu? It's only going to get better - go on, make it happen.
Pete:
First of all, the Digital Britain report - heard of that?
Carl:
No, that sounds like, Has Britain Got Talent? Has Britain Got Digital - yeah?
Pete:
So this is the Government's plan for getting everyone digital in Britain, and they want all homes to have broadband by 2012, up to 2 meg in speed.
Carl:
Okey dokey, I can do that, I might be ten minutes late or so, maybe half eight.
Pete:
There you go, excellent. So we want to talk, in this show, about broadband speed - a key issue for a lot of people, how to get faster broadband.
Carl:
OK, inspire me with your knowledge.
Pete:
So first of all, when you see an ad for broadband, what's the up to thing that you get with it?
Carl:
Usually up to about eight meg, isn't it?
Pete:
And what does eight meg mean?
Carl:
Eight meg per minute, per second? - I don't know, it's how much information you can download in a period of time.
Pete:
Yeah, kind of - so it stands for eight megabits per second, the number of megabits, not megabytes, number of bits that you can pull down over your broadband connection.
Carl:
And a bit is smaller than a byte?
Pete:
Is it? - well, by eight times.
Carl:
Absolutely.
Pete:
There you go - you knew that, didn't you?
Carl:
Yeah, there are eight bits to a byte.
Pete:
Wow - very impressed. So there you go, eight meg is the sort of typical speed that you get if you sign up to an internet service provider, although they say up to eight meg, in reality you get an awful lot less than that, unless you're kind of sitting right on the doorstep of the phone exchange.
Carl:
OK.
Pete:
So where I am, I'm about one and a bit kilometres from my phone exchange, and I get two and a half, even though I should get up to eight.
Carl:
That's not actually that impressive, is it?
Pete:
Not particularly.
Carl:
Don't tell me though - now it's going up to 20 meg, yeah?
Pete:
Could you stop reading my script?
Carl:
It's all right - I was just trying to speed things up, it was getting tedious.
Pete:
Thanks. BT have announced ADSL 2+ is being rolled out in the next couple of weeks, and that will potentially give people up to 20 meg of broadband at no extra charge, which is rather nice.
Carl:
That's OK then.
Pete:
The other thing to do is hang yourself out the window, find the lead that comes into your house from BT, and just pull, keep pulling, and eventually your house will get nearer to the phone exchange.
Carl:
You're not normally funny, are you? I think you should keep away from that.
Pete:
Yeah, sorry, I'll leave it to the expert. When's he turning up by the way? - is he on the way? So anyway, this is this new thing called ADSL 2+ from BT, you have to ask for it, they're not going to give it to you for free, and you also have to agree to stay with BT for another twelve months.
Carl:
That's all right, I can manage that.
Pete:
So the next question I'd like you to ask is, are any other broadband providers doing anything better?
Carl:
Imagine I had, but in a thick Hungarian accent.
Pete:
OK, there's something called "LLU" - Local Loop Unbundling.
Carl:
Aah - this is like an entanglement, yes?
Pete:
Er no, not at all. So this is the idea that BT currently own all the infrastructure for the phone networks, so that's the copper wires, the little cabinets, the phone exchanges and everything else. So a few years ago, if you wanted your Internet, you had to go through BT, even if you were going with someone like Tiscali, it would still be going over the BT network. Local Loop Unbundling means a phone exchange can have somebody else's kit in it, so a company like Sky or Be Broadband or whoever can go into the phone exchange, put in their own equipment, and effectively take over the connection of your copper wires from your house into the exchange, and then put it on their internet network as opposed to over BT's network.
Carl:
OK, that seems a fair enough sort of system, I guess we'd get a reduction because of this?
Pete:
Yes you do, so there's a lot of people out there either offering free or very cheap internet, we've had a few new ones recently, O2 broadband's popped up, TalkTalk offered their free broadband for a while, Sky, you can get a free two meg connection over Sky, if you're a Sky subscriber, so there are a number of deals out there.
Carl:
Good - when does this take place?
Pete:
A lot of them are already doing it - there's a company called Be who have been doing 20 megs using ADSL 2+ for a little while now.
Carl:
OK, so how many properties are going to be affected?
Pete:
Well, that's a good question - what they're actually talking about is, this roll out of ADSL 2+ affecting around about 40% of UK homes, and that's apparently going to ramp up to about 55% by next March.
Carl:
Mmm - are there any bad points to all this big story you've got for us?
Pete:
Well, there's not really any bad news, as I say you do have to sign up for another 12 months, if you want this up to 20 meg service from BT. You do really have to be somewhere like three kilometres or closer to your phone exchange, anything over three kilometres, and you're still losing all the noise through the cables and copper wires and everything else, but as I say, it's potentially a free upgrade, and you could find your speeds are increasing, which is pretty good news.
Carl:
Good, OK - so what else?
Pete:
I also want to mention Virgin, good old Virgin, they happen to be where you live, aren't they? - Virgin Cable?
Carl:
I haven't got any virgins living with me - should I have? Twenty-one? How many of them?
Pete:
Have a look under your bed, see what you can find. Virgin are actually offering up to 50 meg over their network.
Carl:
That's better still.
Pete:
It is absolutely better still, but it will set you back £50 a month.
Carl:
That's a little bit pricey.
Pete:
Yeah, absolutely, it's a very expensive option, but you do get up to 50 meg, which is pretty good. It can be discounted down to £35 a month if you take out the Virgin phone service. I also quickly want to mention 21CN, which is this plan for BT to upgrade their phone network, and put in more high capacity fibre cables into networks. That's still going ahead, it seems to be a little slower than expected, but there are still plans for the 21st Century Network from BT to be rolling out as well.
Carl:
So that should hopefully get in within the 21st century, if not the 22nd?
Pete:
Something along those lines. Now, on the subject of speed, a couple of quick tips on how to speed up your connection. The last show we talked about wireless, and how to improve your Wi-Fi speed - you remember, getting an 802.11n router, all those little things, to improve your speed?
Carl:
I remember it very well.
Pete:
Excellent, good lad - thank you very much. So as well as improving your wireless speed, you really need to improve your broadband speed. Now, one thing you should do is run a broadband speed checker - there's a whole bunch of those on line, so go to Google, do a search for broadband speed checker, and then you basically run a check to find out how fast your connection is. Something that's worth doing, if you can, is move your computer right to the main house incoming BT phone point, connect into that, and run it, and what you should find is it'll be a little bit faster than if you were running it from say an extension socket upstairs.
Carl:
OK, this is a bit like holding your radio to the window, isn't it? - and getting a better reception.
Pete:
Kind of, what you actually find is a lot of homes that have got extensions and dodgy handsets and things round the house, the wiring's not perfect, and actually you lose a lot of signal through the home extension wiring. So the thing to do, do your test by pulling out all the extensions, and just connecting in to the main master BT socket. For a lot of people, you'll find their speed ramps up.
Carl:
That's impressive - but what if you do have shoddy wiring, how do you get round this? Do you rewire your house? - just something simple like that, yeah?
Pete:
Yeah, basically - rip all the wires out and start again. No, it's actually slightly more simple than that, there's two options - there's something called the bell wire trick, which is a really cool one - you basically go to your master socket, and hoick out a wire, that's the bell wire. Now this used to be used with the old ring phones and the old dial phones, but modern houses don't actually tend to use them, so you can just temporarily disconnect the bell wire, and actually you'll find that there's a lot less cabling running round the house that will affect your broadband. A lot of people that have tried that have reported really good results. The other thing is this - look at that.
Carl:
I've got one of them.
Pete:
You haven't, I bet you haven't.
Carl:
I bet you I have.
Pete:
You don't know what it is - what is it then?
Carl:
It's for a BT line.
Pete:
What is it?
Carl:
It goes in the house, and the line goes in there, and you'll be able to get broadband from it - it's like an adaptor thing.
Pete:
You haven't got this type though, this is something called the BT I-Plate.
Carl:
Yes I have.
Pete:
I don't think you have, you haven't got broadband?
Carl:
Yes, I have.
Pete:
Have you?
Carl:
Yes.
Pete:
Have you?
Carl:
Yes! I don't use it, but I've got it.
Pete:
Well, you won't have one of these - these are fairly new, and you wouldn't understand.
Carl:
I do.
Pete:
Oh all right, OK, well can I tell the listener?
Carl:
No, tell me.
Pete:
OK, so if you've got a phone socket that looks like that, so it's a square box with a little phone socket, and another bit above it, so it looks like, as you look at it, a two part connectory thing - I'm not describing that very well, am I?
Carl:
No - put a picture on the website ... www.frequencycast.co.uk, and in fact you can just tell them the rest in text, I can't be bothered to listen to you.
Pete:
I need to finish though, this box, called a BT I-Plate, and basically what you do is, you unscrew your phone socket, assuming it's one of these correct ones, gently pull the whole bottom part of the thingy away, replace it with that, and then plug the bit that you've unscrewed in, there's a little hole for the wires to go there, so it's a piece of cake to do, you don't need to unconnect any wires, or do anything like that - you basically take the two screws out, plug that in instead, and then the old bit back in over the top of it, and this has got a special filtering mechanism which eliminates all of the bell wires, and all the other little problems you get. Now BT are saying that the average user that plugs one of these in will find they get a 1.5 meg speed improvement, just by plugging one of these in.
Carl:
Well, that's impressive.
Pete:
So yeah, we can highly recommend this, I've actually tried it, it does work for me, I'm getting about 1.2 improvement when I do my checks.
Carl:
OK, and how much are they?
Pete:
Well, these I-Plates actually cost about £12, however we've discovered that BT are providing them free to broadband customers under certain conditions. We'll stick a link on the show notes - you might be able to get a free I-Plate, all it will cost you is £1.20 P & P.
LINK: BT IPlate from BT Shop and BT Broadband Accelerator page
Carl:
That's not bad.
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Listen to FrequencyCast Show 41 - Broadband in the UK |
More information:
- Broadband in the UK
- Choosing a Broadband Provider (featured in Show 58)
- IPv6 IP Address Help and Advice
- We interview the boss of Plusnet
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