The night before last I decided to go for the free upgrade Zen Internet were offering to go from their 512Kb/s ADSL to the new “Max” product which is a variable speed ADSL depending upon what your line is capable. There is a 20GB per month traffic cap but I’m never going to reach that.

It turns out that this was actually surprisingly quick and painless. After filling out the web form that was that. I got a number of e-mails from Zen stating that it’d take 5-7 days, then at the end of yesterday that the regrade would happen today between 8am and midnight. This morning I find that I’m up and running.

Just to show how bad my line is though, the maximum stable speed my ADSL modem will sync at for the downstream is 2.8Mb/s with a signal to noise ratio margin of a mere 4dB! I think you can see why I’ll never get to that 20GB/month downloa

7 thoughts on “

  1. Well, after a day and a bit, the upstream link speed has decreased to 2.5Mb/s and the actual download speed is down to 1.7Mb/s. Obviously my line wasn’t really capable of those higher rates after all.

      • This morning I drove up to Maplins in Banbury and picked up a new set of BT ADSL line filters after finding that the connect speed on the ADSL modem was far higher if I removed one of my phones.

        Well, now I’m getting a sync speed > 3Mb/s with a signal to noise ratio margin a whole 3dB higher.

        Obviously those old, cheap filters just weren’t good enough for the higher speed connection.

        • Hmm.. in the last hour the exchange has resynchronised with my modem, dropped the speed and managed to increase the instance of damaged packets (both corrected and uncorrected). I wonder what the heck BT’s software is doing (other than possibly making things worse).

          • And yes, over night the speed’s dropped again.. and the error rate has increased *AGAIN*.

            I thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

Leave a Reply to steve Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.