adsl24

After putting up with a couple of weeks of poor ADSL throughput, along with the rest of Entanet's customers following the introduction of their new 'better for 90% of the people' traffic shaping system, I've voted with my feet and signed up with http://fast.co.uk/. Five day turnaround expected..

I fitted the hard wired ADSL filter to the alarm panel last night. Testing the line stats with and without the alarm panel didn't seem to make much difference to the readings.

I asked ADSL24 to change the interleave status of my line, hoping that it'll restart my ADSL Max sample period. Looking good at the moment with downstream sync rate now at 7.3Mb. Yay!!

I hit the wrong input format this morning.. Anyway - think it would be neater if I split this post off.. Click the Read More link below if you want to see the stats.

I've been fiddling about with my ADSL this weekend. My download sync rate has been steadily dropping from near 8Mb this time last year to just over 3Mb. I'm currently using a Zyxel Prestige 660 modem which allows me to see detailed line data.

Two major changes I've made to get me back to 6.5Mb sync rate were replacing the filters in the lounge (the master socket location) and in the office. At the moment I've got an ADSL Nation XF-1e filter in the lounge and a second NTE-5 in the office that has an ADSL Nation XTE-2005 Master Face Plate on it.

A comparison of the filters can be found at the following page:

http://www.adslnation.com/support/filters.php

I'm still about 1Mb down from what I used to see. To try and rectify this I'm going to firstly try a different modem. I've got a Linksys WAG354G to try first and then I'm going to try running OpenWRT on the Linksys to see how that holds up. I'm hoping that one of the two methods will allow me to graph the line data via SNMP, something that isn't available on the Zyxel.

I'm also going to find out if the second NTE-5 is overkill by replacing it with a filtered faceplate like the ADSL Nation XTF-68 ADSL Telephone Socket or replacing the NTE-5 faceplate on the master socket with the XTE-2005 splitter and running the ADSL and voice over different pairs upto the office and presenting them on a standard double phone socket.

Finally I'm going to get a hardwired ADSL filter to put under the alarm panel. I've got the pair from the alarm panel connected to the voice side of the splitter in the office but I'd like to put as much suppression as possible on that circuit, as close to the alarm panel as possible as it's the only thing connected (apart from the modem) when I run the readings below.

I've been with the geeky ISP, Andrews and Arnold, for the last couple of years and been happy with the service that I get. I've never used the huge IPV6 or VoIP services that they gave me for nothing though. I pay a premium as it costs £39.99 per month for my ADSL service, which gives me 8Mb down, 832kb up, 3GB per month peak usage and unlimited off peak.

I'm trying to cut a few of the recurring monthly costs at the moment, one of which is a second BT line which used to be a dedicated business line. The problem I've got is that the ADSL is on the business line. To move lines I need to pay the BT Wholesale standard conncection fee of £34.86 +VAT to get the other line activated. It's a little more annoying as that line used to have ADSL on it but it was turned off when I migrated to A&A.

ADSL24 get good reports on DSL Zone, only have a one month minimum contract period and don't add £12 profit on the connection fee like A&A do. So I'm going to give it a go and see what it's like. ADSL migrations between ISPs is free so I've not got a great deal to lose if I find it isn't good.

ADSL24's Office 45 product gives me 45GB per month of peak traffic (A&A are giving me 3GB) along with 300GB of off-peak traffic per month (A&A are giving me unlimited off-peak but I've never gone over 100GB in a month total at anytime over the last year). ADSL24 include 8 static IP addresses too.