It sounds like you are on medium length ADSL… if it work for you then great… however you will have likely other options should you wish without investing significant sums, such as 4G with external mounted antenna or failing that satellite broadband.
I lived on 3.6Mbps down speed for years on ADSL until a VDSL fibre cabinet was brought to our village thanks to BDUK/Suffolk CC and lobbying by yours truly when I was a parish councillor.
BTW that anecdote you refer to sounds tongue in cheek…or crossed wires… pardon the pun.
The junction box they were looking for was buried somewhere under the lane. Although they inserted rods from the house, they were unable to get past a blockage.
So you have a line fault and they haven’t repaired? Sounds like you could have compensation…
if there is a noisy line it will be driving your ADSL sync speed even lower. Unless there is more to it than appears I wouldn’t find that acceptable.
Alas this sort of thing can happen with fibre and splitters as well… but one would assume record keeping with new fibre deploys are accurate.
Where we live was upgraded to fibre optic in the street about 6 years ago, we have had excellent internet speeds/reliability since. However, call me a cynic, but on about the same day that the Full fibre ‘upgrade’ letter came through from BT, our internet has been buffering/slow/pages not loading properly since - a way of ‘creating’ demand?
LOL… but on a serious note… if there was a lot of disruption when the new network was deployed and PON fibre shares same ducts with twisted pair bundles, there may have been some damage caused to your line.
Do a quiet line test (you will need a traditional passive analogue phone plugged into your master test socket and dial 17070 option 2 or if you are on a very old exchange and that doesn’t work, then 174 and 175) … does it sound silent… or is there a hiss, whine or a crackle … if so then you have a line fault and your current DSL broadband connection will almost certainly be syncing lower trying to get above the noise level to reduce the error rate…. Not good at all, and you will see go slows and poor performance and you should report a fault.
At least this is easier to check as a consumer on twisted pair as compared to fibre.
Many thanks for the advice. We have an older phone in reserve just incase so when I get a moment I will plug it in. New cabling was installed in our road over a 6 week period (on Sundays) about 3 months ago and all has been fine until the last week or so.
Ok good luck… yes it might be not related, but worth checking… but I think it is safe to assume there is no machiavellian switch somewhere that reduces performance for a user to prompt them to upgrade…
We’re getting full fibre installed soon (hopefully by the end of this month) as part of an Openreach community fibre project. All we can get at the moment is ADSL2 and 11Mb down and 1Mb up and that really doesn’t cut it these days. 4k streaming? Yes please!
We’ll most likely be going with a small ISP called Giganet, 150Mb download speeds for £32/month which isn’t much more than we’re paying for ADSL. With full fibre not only do you not need a working phone line, Giganet don’t even offer a phone service so we’ll be taking the opportunity to port the existing land line number to a VoIP service. We’ll use mobiles for outgoing calls and VoIP for incoming calls only and with Sipgate the starter account tier is free so it won’t cost us anything to have the same landline number to receive calls on. And with VoIP you can install a softphone app on the mobile phone and receive calls to your landline number on that wherever you have an internet connection.
The conclusion seems to be you really don’t need 1gig internet and the 250meg option is fine (what Zen calls their ‘500’ package). The previous house owner had an FTTP connection PLUS a separate PSTN line (two lines from the pole). I wonder if he opted for a PSTN line as well due to frequent power fails in the village and zero mobile signal - back to one of my previous gripes with PSTN shut off! Interestingly… no mobile phone signals BUT the valley does have a dedicated 5G data only network put in by the government at huge expense and, by the time they got the planning permission and installed the 5G system, FTTP had already made it’s way to the villages in question!
Yes with PON fibre broadband, the phone service should you wish becomes a VoIP service.
The same will happen with all twisted pair ‘phone lines’ by 2025 as scheduled.
Increasingly one doesn’t have old style phone lines now on new deploys with twisted pair, but instead data lines such as with SOGEA … (dsl service with no phone line service) with an embedded VoIP service should you require it plugged into your router or via DECT.
I am not aware you have to have one or the other… if your local exchange is still offering an analogue phone service you can order it…
However where there is unreliable alternate phone access such as no mobile, you can select legally at no charge, and I believe you should be offered, though it appears current legislation puts the onus on the consumer to ask for it, a UPS for your ONT and router for your VoIP service on your fibre PON broadband. This allows you to make emergency calls, or panic alarm calls etc in the event of a power cut for upto one hour.
In locations where power can go off for 12 hours or more (BTDT and got the compensation cheques from Powergen, at two houses and, the last time, even the mobile masts went down for several hours) then a UPS which, at best (and assuming the UPS is in tip-top condition and not a couple of years old) is good for an hour, is NOT a viable alternative.
Yep there are exceptions… we had power off for a week before now… small little rural exchanges would unlikely remain powered for that long, and of course mobile phone masts only have a limited standby power. At least 999 utilises access to any mobile network that is accessible irrespective of whom you contract.
It shows how reliable we are on the electricity supply.
Luckily the reliability of my power has hugely improved in recent years… and probably no more than half a dozen power cuts in the last year with only one I can think of being longer than an hour.
Before the overland network was improved, we had frequent power cuts and brown outs some for protracted periods of time.
Couple of months ago we moved from 15mbs copper to 150mbs FTTP. From my perspective the 15mbs was adequate (could run a teams meeting with decent video quality) but somewhat unreliable. With the FTTP service has, thus far, been solid.
My son was very pleased with the upgrade as he’s a gamer and downloading games used to take days, now hours. Last week I had an email from BT offering an upgrade to 500mbs for an extra £3 per month. Discussed with my son and we decided not to bother. Day to day wouldn’t deliver any benefit.
In terms of infrastructure, this shows the old (redundant) master socket on the left, then the fibre junction box, and then the modem which connects to the BT wifi hub via an Ethernet cable.
Yep, the box on the right is the ONT… it does the clever stuff with PON connectivity … PON one side, typically twisted pair Ethernet the other side connected to your router (hub etc). Think of the ONT like your previous xDSL modem… but it is actually quite different from a modem, it’s a PON termination point, but I note consumer literature call it a ‘modem’… which might confuse some in due course
Depending on your provider and what you requested your phone service could/has have been migrated to a new VoIP service via the phone socket on your new router (home hub)
You are welcome… bit like a busman’s holiday… it’s interesting to look up the consumer stuff to see what is evolving… I work more in the commercial space.
I’ve got one phone in the back of the Router (VOIP) and one in the original BT socket. Strangely, both give a dialling tone, and both ring. I assumed they would remove the old one. Perhaps they do it in bulk when they have enough to do
Tried a phone in the old master socket this morning, during an unscheduled power outage. Got a dial tone but every number I tried (starting with the NIE fault number) resulted in “the number is not recognised”.
In the end I had to go upstairs and hang out a Velux to get a signal and report that we had no electricity.
