Internet Woes…

Yesterday the BBC reported that around about 3 million homes in the UK have less that 2Mbps broadband speed, and it isn’t just rural communities that are missing out. You can read the full article here.

Ironically just as I was listening to that report on the news at lunch time, I noticed that my internet had slowed down significantly. Kind of ironic I guess. Now I do live in a rural area in south Down, so I don’t expect to get really high speeds, like the 10Mbps I get with Virgin Media in Belfast. I do however figure that my internet access should, be at least usable. So as I was saying, I have been used to my internet here being slow, but I had never done a speedtest on it. Now according to BT, the line to the house should be able to carry up to 4Mbps, and I live 2 miles from the exchange, not too far.

So I did a speed test. Now my 10M connection in Belfast has a download speed of about 8 or 9, so I was shocked at the results for my connection down here.

A download speed of 130Kbps. Appalling is the word I would use to describe it. It means that if more than one person is trying to use the internet at once, it is nigh on impossible to access anything. Twitter times out, email times out, and I can kiss BBC iPlayer goodbye.

I phoned BT, and they went through the usual guff, clear your cache, restart computers, restart Home Hub, blah blah blah. Did all they asked with no luck, so they said they would check the line. BT phoned back and told me that there was a fault on the line and it would be dealt with. However about 2 hours later they phoned back to tell me to unscrew the main phone socket and plug the Hub directly into the test socket behind. I did as they asked but there was no test socket. So… they are sending an engineer out tomorrow to look at the problem.

Here’s hoping they get it sorted….

***UPDATE***

BT engineer just left, after some tinkering with wires and a phone call to thead office…

VAST improvement, thank you…