It must be able to go faster

I recently moved home, near to Stratford upon Avon, and one of the hopes I had was faster broadband. It wasn’t the only reason for moving of course… After years of doing no better than 0.5 Mb/s in Gloucestershire on BT’s network I was expecting big things, so imagine my disappointment when I plugged my router in to find my download had jumped to only 1.1 Mb/s. With my telephone line now just over 3 KM long it was substantially shorter than the 5.1 KM line I used to have. So what to do?

First stop was to get my electrician to isolate the BT master socket from the rest of the sockets in the house. Who needs the other sockets anyway now? With the advent of wireless everything I can’t see the point. He also had to move the socket as it was in a rather inconvenient part of the house. Once complete, I plugged in the router to find bandwidth balloon to 3.08 Mb/s down and 0.7 Mb/s up. Surely with this success under my belt I could go faster still?

A firmware upgrade on the router had no further impact on speed so the next stop was a BT IPlate (funny how the ‘i’ makes it sound more modern and cool, when in fact it is just a piece of ugly plastic). Hailed by BT as the solution to slow broadband, I thought I must be onto a winner and duly fitted it. Speeds this time did not leap but slowly crept up to 3.5 Mb/s down but upload dropped in retaliation to 0.63 Mb/s.

So that is where I find myself currently. Not bad considering the distance my house is from the local telephone exchange and much better than the 2 Mb/s universal speed government want to see across the country over the coming years. My experience does at least demonstrate the difference internal wiring can have on the speed of your home broadband compared to other factors such as the router.