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.