About 10 days ago we had our internet connection activated at Awesome Manor. It’s Be Internet’s (up to) 24Mb all-you-can eat buffet package.

Problems, naturally, began immediately. During the normal period of line testing that the ADSL2+ products use to determine the maximum stable rate of the line, we saw massive instability and fluctuating speeds from 12Mb down to 300kb. Not ideal for a house full of internet junkies.

As it turns out, BT has been screwing around with the Barnet exchange for the past week, which has stuffed up our MSR testing well and good. It looks like Be have settled on 12Mb/1.3Mb for our line now, which at under 1km from the exchange is just not good enough.

Rather worse, however, is the quality of wiring in Awesome Manor. Judging from the amount of work I’ve just done to minimise noise on the lines (pulling the bell wire from all extension sockets, and stripping and rewiring the master) I’d guess that most of the wiring is older than I am.

After much work, and much swearing, I’ve managed to reduce line attenuation (signal loss due to the crappy quality of wiring) by more than 50%. This seems to have stabilised the line, and is a good start for improved line speed when the MSR tests finish later this week.

The worst thing is, I’m about as technical as you get. I dread to think what normal people go through in this kind of situation. I can only assume that if they reach breaking point they would fork out a few hundred quid for a BT engineer to come and rewire their house, which seems like a fairly expensive way to solve a problem that can be fixed with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.