Moving to the sticks - need BB help

Moving to the sticks - need BB help

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Discussion

Mr Noble

Original Poster:

6,535 posts

232 months

Wednesday 1st August 2012
quotequote all
Moving to the sticks soon. Checker says 3-7mb is available. Have been on 100mb Virgin for last few years so eek


I think I'm going to go for the BT deal that's on TV advertised right now.


Any suggestions for making things faster or is BT likely to be the best I can get?


boxst

3,699 posts

144 months

Wednesday 1st August 2012
quotequote all
Where are you moving to? Put your new postcode into SamKnows.

plasticpig

12,932 posts

224 months

Wednesday 1st August 2012
quotequote all
Depends how much money you want to spend. You could get two ADSL lines and bond them. Your chosen ISP needs to support bonded lines and it's a lot more expensive. BE offer it for £65 a month. There are other ISP's that offer it but last time I looked BE were the cheapest I could find.






Pooky67

577 posts

158 months

Wednesday 1st August 2012
quotequote all
Best thing is to keep everything simple in your property. Less is more. I you can get away with one master point with the router and a set of cordless phones then do this.

arcturus

1,489 posts

262 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Enta will bond lines for free. You just pay for two BB connections and supply your own kit to do the bonding at your end (about £50). I have done it and it works well.

telford_mike

1,219 posts

184 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
If you can get 3 - 7 mb, you are not in the sticks wink

Best advice has already been given - keep your internal telephone network as simple as possible. Those iplate things help too.

On a good day I get 2.5mb, most of which I use checking the BT site to see when fibre might be coming smile

LordGrover

33,531 posts

211 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Mr Noble said:
Moving to the sticks soon. Checker says 3-7mb is available. Have been on 100mb Virgin for last few years so eek


I think I'm going to go for the BT deal that's on TV advertised right now.


Any suggestions for making things faster or is BT likely to be the best I can get?
If you get nearer the 7MB it's not so bad - most of us 'suffer' that kind of bandwidth and it's fine. You've just been spoiled. tongue out

Mr Noble

Original Poster:

6,535 posts

232 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Thanks for all the help and support through this difficult time. It's much appreciated wink


The Bonding thing looks very interesting.


Best plan I think is to give it a go for a couple of weeks and see how much I want to kill myself. If the "special movies" don't buffer, then I think I'll survive biggrin


thumbup

Luke.

10,944 posts

249 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Mr Noble said:
Thanks for all the help and support through this difficult time. It's much appreciated wink


The Bonding thing looks very interesting.


Best plan I think is to give it a go for a couple of weeks and see how much I want to kill myself. If the "special movies" don't buffer, then I think I'll survive biggrin


thumbup
6-7meg you'll be fine. I'm on 0.80meg. Brilliant.

shtu

3,407 posts

145 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Here's Shtu's Patented Top Tips for Rural ADSL. (Based on 5 years work to bring a 256kb connection up to 2Mb. At roughly 9.5Km from the exchange)

If you don't have a modern NTE5 master socket - get one installed. BT charge about £30 for "regularisation" of the wiring. I cannot suggest buying an Openreach-branded one from eBay and installing yourself, even though it's a 15 min job. That's illegal, even though it's simple to transfer the A and B connections from the existing to the new.
Ahem.

DIY-Shed master socket? 3rd-party chrome or brass one? Bin, get an Openreach one fitted.

Check that when you remove the front part of the master socket to get at the test socket, every extension in the house goes dead. Check each one in turn with a corded phone.

Check for monitored alarm diallers, Oil or Gas tank "Watchman" devices, basically anything else that could be connected to the line. Find out where they connect, and how. The installers of these have a nasty habit of connecting them directly to the BT wiring, which is both bad practice, and illegal.

Check the incoming "drop" wire for any signs of damage from tree branches or the like. Take a look at any overhead cable near your house too.

If there is a small grey box screwed to the wall that the drop wire goes into, you may want to carefully take the cover off, and check that all the connections look to be in good condition and not damp or corroded.

Get an Openreach-branded filtered faceplate, and replace the front part of the master socket with this. Any further wiring should be connected to the faceplate.

Choose a router that works well on long lines. The 2Wire 2700HGV is an excellent device in this respect, although it can seem limited in some areas as it's intended as a router for BT business customers. It can be used with other ISPs with some work.

Using a corded phone plugged into the test socket (and nothing else), dial 17070, choose option 2, and listen. You may hear a very faint background hiss. Any crackles, pops, rustlilng? Book a voice fault for intermittent line noise and don't mention broadband.

The line checker estimates are deliberately conservative, so wait and see what you get when you actually plug in a router. Id' stil recommend following the above steps to make the most of what you have.

Edited by shtu on Thursday 2nd August 11:22

Luke.

10,944 posts

249 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
shtu said:
Here's Shtu's Patented Top Tips for Rural ADSL. (Based on 5 years work to bring a 256kb connection up to 2Mb. At roughly 9.5Km from the exchange)

If you don't have a modern NTE5 master socket - get one installed. BT charge about £30 for "regularisation" of the wiring. I cannot suggest buying an Openreach-branded one from eBay and installing yourself, even though it's a 15 min job. That's illegal, even though it's simple to transfer the A and B connections from the existing to the new.
Ahem.

DIY-Shed master socket? 3rd-party chrome or brass one? Bin, get an Openreach one fitted.

Check that when you remove the front part of the master socket to get at the test socket, every extension in the house goes dead. Check each one in turn with a corded phone.

Check for monitored alarm diallers, Oil or Gas tank "Watchman" devices, basically anything else that could be connected to the line. Find out where they connect, and how. The installers of these have a nasty habit of connecting them directly to the BT wiring, which is both bad practice, and illegal.

Check the incoming "drop" wire for any signs of damage from tree branches or the like. Take a look at any overhead cable near your house too.

If there is a small grey box screwed to the wall that the drop wire goes into, you may want to carefully take the cover off, and check that all the connections look to be in good condition and not damp or corroded.

Get an Openreach-branded filtered faceplate, and replace the front part of the master socket with this. Any further wiring should be connected to the faceplate.

Choose a router that works well on long lines. The 2Wire 2700HGV is an excellent device in this respect, although it can seem limited in some areas as it's intended as a router for BT business customers. It can be used with other ISPs with some work.

Using a corded phone plugged into the test socket (and nothing else), dial 17070, choose option 2, and listen. You may hear a very faint background hiss. Any crackles, pops, rustlilng? Book a voice fault for intermittent line noise and don't mention broadband.
Great post.

LordGrover

33,531 posts

211 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Luke. said:
shtu said:
Lots.
Great post.
yes Thanks.

cuneus

5,963 posts

241 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Just to add about rural stuff:

The Billion 7800N is much better than the 2700 (I still have that as well)

Routerstats is excellent for monitoring

Kuroblack350

1,383 posts

199 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Not sure if there are any operating in your area, but we have rural broadband provider that operates a fibre to mast system (at least I think that's what it's called!)

We have a small box on our roof that means we're good for 20mb speeds. (line of sight to transmitter)It also means that we don't need a BT line anymore smile

Not that expensive either, we're paying £15 per month for 10mb. Until the local exchange upgrades, it's doing a great job.

Luke.

10,944 posts

249 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
Kuroblack350 said:
Not sure if there are any operating in your area, but we have rural broadband provider that operates a fibre to mast system (at least I think that's what it's called!)

We have a small box on our roof that means we're good for 20mb speeds. (line of sight to transmitter)It also means that we don't need a BT line anymore smile

Not that expensive either, we're paying £15 per month for 10mb. Until the local exchange upgrades, it's doing a great job.
sounds good. Any more details?

Mr Noble

Original Poster:

6,535 posts

232 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
LordGrover said:
Luke. said:
shtu said:
Lots.
Great post.
yes Thanks.
thumbup Thanks you.

plasticpig

12,932 posts

224 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
shtu said:
Get an Openreach-branded filtered faceplate, and replace the front part of the master socket with this. Any further wiring should be connected to the faceplate.
You don't need an Openreach branded one. You can save a couple of quid and get a Pressac one. Apart from the branding on the face plate they are identical.



The_Doc

4,856 posts

219 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
shtu said:
Here's Shtu's Patented Top Tips for Rural ADSL. (Based on 5 years work to bring a 256kb connection up to 2Mb. At roughly 9.5Km from the exchange)

SNIP !!!!
LEGENDARY !!!

I'm just moving from 60Mb fibreoptic Leeds suburbia, to a beautiful Cumbrian village, where the locals stare at the electricity poles with a mixture of suspicion and fear.

I'm going to need this post over the next 6 months !!

many thanks !

Bill

52,472 posts

254 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
I moved from central Bristol to rural Dorset 2 miles down a copper wire from the exchange and (admittedly I don't download etc a great deal) the drop in performance isn't too bad. I use Zen so they have to deal with BT... The issue we've had is the odd outage. The worst was a week without BB or phone because BT were swamped and needed a cherry picker to sort it.

y2blade

56,029 posts

214 months

Thursday 2nd August 2012
quotequote all
telford_mike said:
If you can get 3 - 7 mb, you are not in the sticks wink
This^^^^^

Bloody townies! rolleyes