I have suffered dropped connections, pitifully slow connections, you name it, for 2 years. BT blamed the aluminium cabling to the local exchange, my being out in the sticks, my PC, my ISP, and ground me down until I could no longer be bothered and just accepted things as they were. It came to a head over the weekend when things all but stopped altogether. A friend suggested I visit your kitz.co.uk site and see if I could find the issue myself. I just wish to thank you, this is my story:
My connection to my well rated ISP has been very fickle for near two years. BT have been out several times. I was less than impressed by what they did, I got the impression they were just passing the buck to my computer, and my ISP. I decided after a friend gave me some encouragement, to have a go myself, so read up on ADSL wiring, filters and any means of monitoring the line yourself. Armed with freebie software off the links on this site, a torch and a screwdriver I saw a lot of noise on the line and a poor signal to noise ratio. It was immediately apparent things were not right. Mr. BT Repairman never admitted an issue... I remember one chap who came saying "this is a bit of a mess, better leave that". Now to me, "a bit of a mess" = a likely cause of trouble, not "it looks a PITA to get at and could keep me here for hours, I'll ignore that". For some reason the ADSL master socket is up in the loft. I remember asking the BT man if the bell ring line was disconnected, as it's apparently superfluous with modern phones, and the redundant wire can act as an antenna, picking up stray noise? He said it was... Rubbish, still connected, so I went to pull the wires out and check the three extension sockets were similarly modified. Pull the wires out? The bloody things FELL out, and he was right, what a mess. A short time later and I am confident months of trouble are sorted. See the before and after graphs for the signal to noise ratios. Currently downloading Linux Mint (cos it's a big file), sending this and checking e-mail, before I would have had several bouts of the ADSL router light for a dropped connection showing and something 900 plus megs in size would have taken many resumes or retries to grab. Looks promising with 3 minutes to go. All done, first clean download of something that size in God knows how long
Great resource of info, and much appreciated.
My ADSL router is a by now 13 year old Netgear DG834 v2, is there any benefit in getting something newer? It's true, I am well out in the sticks, there IS aluminium cabling to the exchange, and we are one of the furthest properties from it, so I don't expect miracles, but every little helps.
Cheers.
