Since I upgraded my living situation a few weeks ago (moved into a new house share with 2 friends) I’ve been without an internet connection. We ended up having to wait 2 weeks for BT to “install” our phone line (in quotes since it was physically already there), then around 10 days for the ISP to active the ADSL. Being without an internet connection at home feels really weird. Even more so since we don’t have TV either, which meant we were rather cut off from the world (hope I didn’t miss anything important).
Anyway, yesterday the ADSL started working (2 days early actually). Happy times… kind of.
We’re on an 8Mbit service, but I’m struggling to get more than around 70KB/sec for downloads. This is, as you can probably imagine, is a bit of the step back from the 700KB/sec or more that I’ve been accustomed to. Just now I needed to grab a copy of Spring-WS - 25MB - it took almost 7 minutes! Sigh…
I’m assuming the problem is the length of the line from the house to the exchange (very roughly about 3 miles) combined with less than amazing in-house wiring. Initially the router was connecting at only 800Kbps! You don’t expect to get all of the bandwidth they claim, but a tenth it just ridiculous.
Switching the rather crappy looking micro filter which was left by the previous occupants for the decent one I’ve used before got that up to 2200Kbps. However, the actual speed of connection didn’t change much. I’m putting this down the (according to what I can work out) horrendous attenuation and noise margin (59dB/6dB if you’re interested). I’ve yet to really dig into the things that can be done about this (hey, I’m busy), but I’m hoping I can improved the situation a bit.
Ah well, at least we’re online now 
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