Broadband should be a simple technology. Plug in your router, enter the username and password provided by your ISP and hey presto. Yeah Right!
Many people have problems with their Broadband connections at some point. Most people expect to get a 24 Mbps download speed as this is the connection they think they are paying for and then don't understand why they are only getting 3-4 Mbps.
There are still some ISP's that do have reasonably good customer support services available to their customers but there are a good few that seem like they don't even want to speak to you after they have taken your money and tightly bound you into a 12-18 month contract. This leaves getting good advice on fixing or getting the best out of your connection very hard. The real problems come when your chosen ISP has not properly trained it's staff to any great standard. Either this or their first line of customer support is based in Asia to save money on staffing costs, causing inevitable language difficulties.
The sad fact in all this is that the majority of problems that I see have been relatively simple to fix with no more than a small amount of knowledge and a few tweaks to home telephone wiring. The unfortunate fact is that a lot of the rest of the problems are just not fixable, if you only have a telephone line capable of giving you 5 Mbps then there is pretty much nothing that can be done about it.
Herein lies the problem. It is very difficult for ISP support staff to explain to somebody over the phone how to tweak their telephone line to fix problems or how to troubleshoot basic networking problems when you probably don't understand what information they want from you, how to find this information or the terminology they are using.
Hence the reason for the site. It is aimed at the average home user to try to explain how things work and gives some simple steps to take when troubleshooting today's Broadband problems. It certainly will not help with all problems under the sun but at least this will give you a head start in understanding the information that you need to get things tuned at your end and some of the problems that will need to be reported to your ISP.
Please be advised, this is a beginners guide to solve some of the more simpler problems experienced and it is based around ADSL technologies. For more advanced problem finding solutions or if looking for information on different technologies like Cable I would advise taking a look through the links provided on the left of the page, in particular thinkbroadband.com, which has an excellent forum where you will be able to find help.
