Finally got sick of the talktalk service about 6 weeks ago. Got told that we could get Sky fibre so went with that. For some reason I am unclear about we had to go with copper bb initially and then they would upgrade us to fibre after a month. So, called Sky on Friday and surprise surprise no you can’t have fibre. If you don’t like it take your business elsewhere. We get 1.8 meg on a good day. We live in a semi rural spot. It seems there is fibre to the cabinet but that’s it. We are a couple of miles from the cabinet. Virgin is not an option. The other ISPs will all use the same hardware so I don’t think changing to Plusnet or somebody similar will improve things. Any bright ideas for improving the situation? I am a technophobe so complicated solutions will just confuse me.

Satellite is the only option sorry

Since East Northants council don’t think our part of the county needs to be in the 21st century, we (the village community) had to campaign (FB, posters, door-to-door, etc.) to get enough people to commmit to Gigaclear before they would put in the infrastructure. It’s taken over a year so far, but 1/2 the village is now connected to (up to, depending on package) 1000Mbps fibre and the other 1/2 (including me) should be online before Christmas.

How big is your ‘catchment’? IIRC we needed about 200 account commitments to make it happen.

Satellite is the only option sorry

4G Dongle? Could get pricey long term though.

1.8 sounds pretty shocking so it might be worth trying PlusNet – their tech support is good, and might help straighten out some issues with the copper to get you to 6ish up / 448kbps down. I live in the middle of nowhere (for the south anyway) and get that.

Have just upgraded from 1.5 on a good day so I share your pain. I think people fail to realise how much of the country doesn’t get decent broadband. We went from 50mb when we moved from London in 2003 to dial up! Took until 2006 to get any broadband, and it has just been upgraded last week to fibre so I can get 50mb again!

Satellite doesn’t work well (or perhaps at all) when it rains, which didn’t seem a fat lot of good when we were looking at this. Plus latency – though people disagree about how much that matters, depends on your usage.

Lots of rural areas round here are getting their own community solutions.

It seems there is fibre to the cabinet but that’s it.

That’s all there’s likely to be. Fibre to the premises is a) unusual and b) expensive. The “last mile” from the cab to your house will almost always be copper.

The other ISPs will all use the same hardware

That’s not strictly true. Most regular ADSL is BT Wholesale resold so will be identical between providers, however some ISPs provide their own equipment in BT exchanges and is likely to be better (this is called LLU).

In your situation your best option is going to be FTTC or failing that LLU. If you use the broadband checker at http://www.sanknows.com you can find out what options are available to you. There’s not much you can do about the last mile though.

Other things you can do is get BT to check the phone line; they won’t care about ADSL speeds but will jump if your line is crackly / noisy for voice. Is it? And make sure your home wiring isn’t introducing issues – plug the router directly into the Master socket’s test socket, you’ll need to remove the lower face plate to access this. Check the speed then, if it improves you’ve got wiring issues in your home which we can look to improve.

Lots of rural areas round here are getting their own community solutions.

Yeah, it’s called B4RN – a friend of mine spearheaded it.

I live in a major city, and I don’t get fibre. 3.5mb/s down, but sometimes only 100kbps up.

Any progress on unlimited (or high usage) 4G?

EDIT I see EE are doing 50GB/m for £40. I’ve never monitored how much we use, but we are on Netflix most nights, probably 2-3 hours a day in total.

I went with Zen after reading good reviews but a few months after I joined they put the price up because I live in a high cost area and they started passing on the extra cost to customers. So I’ve left for IDNet who I have been with before and I have found them so far to be better than Zen. I am also still waiting for a refund from Zen 2 months later…

Edit: IDNet aren’t the cheapest but I’m going for the ‘you get what you pay for’ and was limited of who can actually supply broadband here.

Also make sure your router is connected to the main BT socket. It might be worth looking into routers that can hold a long line well. I had a Billion 7800n (which is now discontinued I think) and it got more out of my line in my last house than the average around me.

I reckon there must be things you can do at home to improve the speed. We are 6.5 miles from the cabinet on copper wires, the last 1/2 mile is a mis-mash of cables cobbled together as various storms have broken the wire between just about every post. We currently get 2.2 mb with BT as provider. Have you got the router wired directly to the BT box where it comes into the house using an BT accelerator?

http://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/I-Plate-broadband-accelerator-adsl-faceplate

Have you made sure all old extension circuits in the house are removed from the system?

Have you done a line test to make sure there isn’t even a faint bit of crackle on the line (caused by a damaged wire or connection on a post somewhere)? The phone will work fine but the BB will continue to run at the lowest reliable speed possible until the fault is fixed.

Anyway, I feel your pain. Good luck with sorting it out. Perhaps you are best off being with BT until you get the line sorted as they seem to be the only ones capable of getting Openreach to do anything about it.

And the Satellite option is pants unless all you do is send a couple of emails a day and that’s it!

Its not clear from your original post as to whether you are still on copper broadband or a fibre (to the cab) product.

If on copper, the fibre cab may be full to capacity but they should just tell you this.

Improving your existing speed – simplest way is to strip out all the extensions and plug your router into the master socket. An extension can cause the signal to reflect back and reduce performance…there are various filter/face plates to help with this but better to get rid that filter out the issues.

I wouldn’t worry about a ‘mishmash’ of cables cobbled together in the network, the joints are insulation displacement crimps with petroleum jelly so do not hinder performance, the line will be tested for earth/battery contacts, poor insulation resistance etc.

BT deal with Openreach in the same way as the other ISPs, and although they sometimes (often) offer dreadful customer service, it may just be they are less likely to play the blame game and bounce issues back and forth to Openreach…they don’t have any more clout than TalkTalk.