Something New Every Day

A record of doing a new thing every day in 2011

Home broadband speed improved x4 (84/365) Friday March 25, 2011

When I got home on Thursday our broadband connection was out, and after further investigation our phones were out too. After going through the slightly ridiculous steps on the automated BT helpline, I managed to get an engineer out to look at the problem.

It turns out it was some problem outside the house - possibly a dog relieved itself on the junction box! - but after talking with the extremely helpful engineer I asked whether replacing our rather old internal wiring would help on our broadband speed. He did a quick check on the master line, and reckoned we could get up to 8Mbps which was a shock since I’d never got more than 1.5Mbps on a good day.

The engineer added a new master phone socket near where the outside line comes in, I plugged our router directly into that and already on http://speedtest.net I’m getting 7.05Mbps! This is frankly unbelievable, and is going to make a massive difference - I think mainly being able to watch MLBTV at HD rather than having to watch at poorer quality. Very happy!