Related Sites

1. Your Internal Telephone Wiring.

Your Internal Telephone Wiring is the place where you have most influence. It can also be costing you greatly if things are a little messy.

NTE5 Socket

Your Internal Telephone Wiring starts after the main BT master socket in your house, this is known as the Demarcation Point. Nowadays, these are usually NTE5 master sockets. In my opinion, if you don't have one of these, it is well worth paying British Telecom (BT) to come out and fit one. This is because it is a simple, well designed socket that has a very clear your side and not your side. It makes it easy to isolate everything on your side so you can tell if your Internal Telephone Wiring is having any effect on your ADSL connection. You Must Not Touch Anything On BT's Side Of The Master Socket.

So what does this leave? In reality only the small amount of cable running round your house and the extension sockets. However these have the potential to pick up a lot of noise which can greatly affect your connection. For a quick guide on some of the things that can be done to tidy up a little visit my page on Optimizing Your Wiring.

If you have Broadband problems it is important to isolate where the problem is. If your Internal Telephone Wiring is a mess you can never rule that out as being a possible cause for random disconnects, or the reason you can only get 4Mbps when you where expecting 6Mbps. As you can't affect the length of your line to the exchange it is silly not to get a little more for your money just by tidying up your Internal Telephone Wiring.

If your Internet connection suddenly dies, the My wiring hasn't changed so that's not the problem objection can be counter productive. Who's to say a Microfilter hasn't suddenly died a quick death? And if some noise external to your property has risen (which you have little control over, if any) this could now be being amplified by any poor wiring that never used to be a problem.

When dealing with Broadband problems the less noise your line is picking up the better. This will give you a better Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). This is what you are trying to maximize when tweaking your Internal Telephone Wiring, you may not always make a difference but you can make a considerable difference to both speed and stability.

2. The Local Loop.

The next section in your data's journey to the Internet is the Local Loop. In most of the country BT Openreach are responsible for this part of the chain. The Local Loop is the cabling from the master socket to the telephone exchange and this is the most important factor in determining how fast your Broadband connection will be.

You see, the longer the line from your house to the exchange the more noise it will pick up and the lower your SNR will be. Other factors will also affect your SNR, though. If the cabling between your house and the exchange is made of Aluminium, which was temporarily used as a cheaper alternative to copper, you will find you will have a higher Attenuation (ATT), which is a measurement of resistance. The longer the cable and the higher the resistance the less signal you will receive. Your line will pick up noise if your telephone line runs along telephone poles back to the exchange rather than going underground or if it runs past any device projecting a large amount of interference. There is little you can do to affect your Attenuation but in certain circumstances when a specific problem can be found between you and the exchange noise problems may get eased or solved.

If your problem also causes a telephone line fault it can be reported directly to BT Retail (assuming they provide your telephone service) who will pass it on to BT Openreach. In the process of fixing the telephone fault your Broadband problems may also clear. However, If your problem is a Broadband only related fault that does not affect your telephone service you must report it to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) who can arrange for a Broadband engineer to check the fault. A BT Openreach telephone engineer will not have the correct equipment to diagnose a Broadband related problem.

Although you rent the telephone line for the calls this is not always connected with your Broadband line (from an accounting, administration or contractual point of view), although things can be different in this respect. The cost of renting the line for Broadband is paid to Openreach by your ISP and / or Telco provider, however there is not a great deal of profit in it. Openreach get about £10 a month to maintain the line, but when totting up costs this is not a great deal. Therefore if you simply have a long or poor line the likely hood is that it will not be changing as if there are no better, spare pairs of cable from your house to the exchange, the roads are not going to get dug and new cables laid for £10 maintenance. I'm afraid, in most cases, you have to do with what you have.

Please be aware that BT is not one company(!?!). The regulator, OFCOM made the company split so it is now three companies. BT Retail, which sells Telephone and Broadband Services, BT Openreach, which is responsible for the Local Loop and finally, BT Wholesale, which runs a Core Network, providing wholesale networks services.

3. The Wholesale Provider.

The Wholesale Provider is the company that is responsible for delivering your Internet traffic from the telephone exchange to your ISP. This is where things used to be easy. BT was the Wholesale Provider. Now things are not so clear cut.

Different ISP's have either installed their own hardware in telephone exchanges or have entered into contracts with companies who have their own equipment in telephone exchanges to have their Internet traffic delivered by this means, rather than using the BT Wholesale network. This is know as Local Loop Unbundling (LLU). Some company's fully LLU, where they provide the Broadband and the telephone service and other company's only part LLU, where they only provide the Broadband and another company of your choosing provides the telephone service. However, a lot of ISP's still use BT Wholesale as their Wholesale Provider.

Inside the telephone exchange your telephone line is connected to a piece of equipment called a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor (DSLAM) or Multi-Service Access Node (MSAN) which separate the telephone signal from the data signal. This equipment is part of the Wholesale Network and has a direct connection to the Wholesale Providers core network. It is the piece of equipment that your router or modem Syncs with and your IP traffic travels through on route to your ISP.

If you change from one ISP to another ISP who uses the same Wholesale Provider it is just a case of changing a setting on a computer system. This can be done or checked if there are any problems remotely. If you change from one ISP to another ISP which uses a different Wholesale Provider your actual line needs to be physically disconnected from one Wholesale Providers DSLAM / MSAN and connected to the other Wholesale Providers equipment. BT Openreach carry out the task of moving the line between different Wholesale Providers equipment.

A recent buzz word has been contention. This, in very basic terms, is when too many people are trying to use too much of a resource, e.g. the bandwidth available on the DSLAM you are connected to. As the resource is shared out between the user base, these users are receiving less than normal levels. Although there used to be a great deal of exchange congestion I personally believe that most of what people describe as congestion these days is actually traffic shaping which the ISP is responsible for, not the Wholesale Provider, and that exchange congestion is not very common these days, although is still sadly with us.

If there are problems with this aspect of your Broadband connection it will need to be dealt with through your ISP. They are the people that have a contract with the Wholesale Provider, not you. Even if you can contact the Wholesale Provider directly the likely hood is that they will not discuss your line with you as, technically, you are not their customer.

Generally, the speed at which wholesale level problems are dealt with depends on the general level of customer service and training at your ISP and their chosen Wholesale Provider. Some are better at others at diagnosing problems, some are better at communicating with there wholesale provider and some don't really seem to want to help you.

4. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Your ISP is the company that sends you the bill. They are the friendly, helpful people on the end of the phone! Here it's important to research carefully because sometimes the best ISP's are the ones that you've never heard of.

Some ISP's are better than others at dealing with their customers, some are better than others at running a network and there have been a couple that have, at times, been pretty rubbish at both. This is why it is so important to think about your choice of ISP carefully when signing up. If you have very little knowledge of the subject but need your Broadband connection for your job perhaps the free offer that comes with your mobile phone is not the best option. However if you rarely use the Internet and it is not too drastic if it is a little slow or down one afternoon then this option might be very attractive.

Remember, you get what you pay for! This could be levels of customer service or network capacity and these really are the main two services you are paying for here.

Even if you have a great deal of knowledge in this area, if there is a problem that can only be fixed by your ISP you need good support staff to understand how you have diagnosed a problem and have some basic understanding of how things work to be able to agree or disagree but, more importantly, can see the most efficient way of dealing with the problem. Anybody that has phoned their ISP and spoken to an Asian call center that is having enough trouble grasping English, let alone what's going on with your Broadband connection will understand this point.

So this is the first area to look at when choosing an ISP. What level of support are you personally going to need? What support structure do your potential candidates have for dealing with faults, i.e. Premium or Local rate telephone numbers for support, Internet ticket based support system etc... and what general level of competency and training do the support staff have? These are all important questions to ask. If you are going to need good support as you truly know nothing about what you are doing and have no friends to ask, then it is probably worth paying a little extra and go with a company with better support channels.

Remember, Broadband is a wires only service, which in effect means all they have to do is provide a reasonable (1/4M) speed service at your master socket, it is up to you to get it working. Trust me, some of them will give you a cryptic booklet to install rubbish software that does not work on your new Vista machine and when you phone them they will tell you your computer is not compatible and feel that's a suitable response and resolution!

The next question that needs asking is what do you use your connection for. This is important because certain types of programs are affected differently by the different ways that ISP's shape the traffic going over there network and the different ways they ask the wholesale provider to set their connections up.

If you are a person that plays a lot of games on the Internet then you will understand the terms ping and latency, if not in simple terms it's to do with the time taken for IP packets to travel from source to destination. This is very important when gaming online. Some ISP's ask for a correction process called interleaving to be turned on on all of their lines. This is more likely to make the connection more stable by correcting errors but it can increase ping times by 10-30ms. This may not sound like much but in the Internet gaming world, sometimes, the fastest ping wins. Generally interleaved can be turned on or off or it can have an auto state, in which if it turns on, it stays on.

The other factor to consider is traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is basically where an ISP slows the rate of a certain type of traffic so that speeds of more essential or time critical traffic is prioritized. As well as the obvious result of this system, the actual process and the specific types of traffic throttled can affect Latency. This type of system is currently needed for many reasons, some which are being addressed and some that, perhaps, are not.

There are a number of other reasons why ISP's have found it beneficial to shape traffic, though, which includes being able to place more customers on a single pipe, which basically means more users share the same amount of bandwidth, which in turn makes more profit. This produces a similar experience to exchange congestion during busy periods and a couple of ISP's have taken heavy criticism for this.

Generally most ISP's these days shape traffic in some way. However this is because a small percentage of net users are using the majority of bandwidth they have available with applications like Peer to Peer file sharing type applications. In this situation generally P2P traffic is slowed so that it does not completely swamp the resources the ISP has available. So you should always try to find out what traffic your ISP shapes at what periods of the day so you don't find the service you need to use at 10:00pm is not possible with your ISP due to that type of traffic being shaped at that time of day.

ISP's that use BT Wholesale have had a disadvantage recently as BT Wholesale have not been allowed to drop their prices by OFCOM, to help stimulate the LLU market. But as this has now grown to a reasonable size restrictions on BTW are being lowered and a restructuring of prices, products and the way their core network works is planned to ease some of the pressure on these ISP's.

5. Anyone Else?

ISP's are like jobs! In the good old days you had a job for life, but in this day and age people are changing jobs every 5 minutes, well, that's what all the old people tell me, anyway! A Broadband connection used to either work or not, but nowadays different ISP's can taylor their product for different markets causing variations in service levels, price levels and services included for different people. This, and a recent bad feeling that ran through the market after a messy BT Max rollout, has meant that just lately a lot of people have found themselves moving ISP. This leaves the problem with any extra's that may have been provided with your Broadband connection.

By extra's I mean things like E-mail Address, Web Space, Domain Registrations etc... all things that can be a pain to sort out when transferring from one ISP to another. This has led to a wider use of hosting companies, you register your Domain with them, you set up your own E-mail addresses with them and you save you web sites on their servers. This means that whenever you do change ISP's all you have to be concerned about is your actual Internet connection and not telling everybody your new mail address or messing around downloading and re-uploading your web sites to your new ISP.

This is something you should consider before moving ISP's, it saves a lot of time and hassle.