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Line Attenuation & ADSL Speed

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Line attenuation is simply the measure of how much signal is lost on your ADSL line from when it leaves the telephone exchange. The more attenuation, the lower the signal ‘strength’, and so eventually the slower your internet connection.

This is one of the main reasons that many people don’t get the advertised ‘up to’ speeds that they expect. If you live a long way away from an exchange, then it is likely that your line attenuation is very high.

There’s a really great website that allows you to input your line attenuation, and it tells you approximately how long your telephone line is. Butit also tells you the maximum speed that your line can connect at. This is a good way to see if your line could support higher speeds, if you were planning to upgrade to a higher speed service, for example.

Here are my results for a Guernsey ADSL connection. What makes it so painful, is that the line could support full ADSL2+ speeds, but it isn’t yet available on the island.

Here’s the website: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/max_speed_calc.php

BT BB Accelerator = 6x speed increase

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Having experienced living in the country, I can tell you that one major disadvantage is internet speed. For months I was stuck on a 512Kbits “broadband” connection (you read it correctly: KILOBITS!).

Luckily I realised that I lived close enough to a telephone exchange to be getting speeds that should be theoretically higher (around 3Mbits), so I decided to get BT’s broadband accelerator (basically a new BT master socket faceplate which filters out noise on the bellwire). And voila! My speed indeed went to a pretty stable 2.5 – 3 Mbps. Installing the new faceplate took seconds, and only a few hours later the connection speed had increased effectively by 6x.

So, the moral of the story is: before shunning your internet speeds and complaining to BT and the like, get a BT broadband accelerator. They are free for all BT Broadband customers (excluding Postage and Packaging), and it’s worth a try even if you don’t think it would make any difference

Link: BT BB Accelerator

Waiting for Apple’s new laptops

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So, you’ve probably heard from somewhere that Apple are expected to release new Macbook Pro’s any day now. But the thing is, they should’ve released them months ago. In fact, it’s been almost 10 months since the last update (which in itself wasn’t that major), and many apple fans are starting to wonder whether apple have all but forgotten that they make products other than the iPad.

While everyone on various forums and internet sites are speculating about which Tuesday it will be released on, I can predict with 100% certainty that they will be released before 2012….

You might want to pop over and look at www.macrumors.com. Their forums are overflowing with speculative rumours and guesses about when the arrandale MBP’s will arrive.

C&W Guernsey plans to upgrade internet

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It may be long overdue, but finally Cable & Wireless (I mean, Sure) have decided to upgrade all standard users on the 2Mbit connection to 4 Mbits this May. Although many in the UK have access to 50Mbit cable, in Guernsey, we are stuck in a time warp in terms of internet.

Yes, many people say it is more expensive on an island, etc etc, but Jersey has much faster speeds compared to Guernsey, so I still don’t see why it has taken so long. But at least it’s now on its way…

Another exciting prospect is that of ADSL2+. While it is unlikely that C&W will launch a service offering 24 Mbits like Sky broadband in the UK, it opens up the door for faster services in the future (the current ADSL only supports a theoretical maximum of 8 Mbits)

Of course, we will have to wait until C&W announce new pricing (if any) until anyone can draw firm conclusions.