Quote:
|
Originally Posted by James Henry
Actually no, aluminium in itself doesn't kill the signal at all, so long as it's thick enough which all of the early aluminium build is. A certain period of network build where BT used a thinner guage of aluminium is the one that's caused a lot of the issues. The only thing that causes issues where the guage of the cable is high enough is any joins there might be between aluminium and copper.
You don't have to be that close to get 8Mbit, I have a full 8 as do people 2km and more away, and have worked on ADSL technology so have a bit of experience with it.
Think I've seen people with lines of around 3.5km who are able to get a full 8Mbps and a stable 8Mbps at that on ADSL. Introduce ADSL2+ into the mix and for those who have lines good enough to achieve 8Mbps it can make a substantial difference.
Still let's deal with worst case scenarios to make the cable look better I guess. At least with ADSL he'd be in with a fair shout of having a more reliable service that doesn't drop out, and he might even have decent support, my own provider's support is really pretty good. For instance they don't ignore me and will at very least check things out while ntl by the looks have totally ignored this guy to the point where they refuse to supply him a new modem at a cost of a few quid, which if nothing else can be proven wrong should be a standard part of trouble shooting and is the least they can do if they're charging him £50 for a service call. Way to get customer satisfaction.
Perhaps if they spent money on improving service rather than giving out discounts and reducing their own income while cutting back on service this chap wouldn't be encountering these issues.
|
I am 3.5KM from my BT exchange. I sync at 2300-2800kbps. A BT engineer who installed my second phone line (I bought a second line in the hopes it would have less attenuation that the first, and it was actually alot worse....) said that the line is exactly 3.6KM from the greenbox at my street to the exchange. My house is 60M from the greenbox.
He said that the reason my Attenuation is 58db is because of the alumimum lines installed decades ago. I can only guess that as you said, I got lucky and got the "special" low grade aluminium somewhere along the way.
You say that in the worse case scenario adsl is still stable. Lets use my line for example. I sync at 2800kbps during the day, but during the evening when everyone comes home, crosstalk or some interference comes into play and affects my SNR, causing my modem to loose sync, and resync at 2300-2400 etc. This can happen few times a day/night, depending on who is firing up their connectinos I assume. Loosing sync is a nightmare for me, being a heavy online gamer, or when im downloading overnight etc.
Also, as I assume you are unaware, when the sun does down ADSL SNR is affected - even on the really short low attenuation lines, the SNR drops a db or two. This can lead to more CRC errors, which will affect your throughput. BT have combated this by introducing interleaving, which increases our pings by 10-20ms
Great if you are an online gamer.
As for ADSL ISP's service, check some of these forums out:
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist...Board=talktalk
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist...&Board=tiscali
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist...=&Board=e7even
In fact our ADSL is so bad our estate of 7 newly built houses are in talks with NTL to costshare £5999 between us to have it cabled up.