Thinkbroadbamd speedtester

I quite like the new style of thinkbroadbands speedtester although its missing jitter and latency on their buttons currently.



http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html?id=137625054038153321796

BT Openreach Tweaks Unbundled LLU Phone Line Prices for UK ISPs

Good news for the bigger ISP's with MPF wanting to get their customer base off SMPF circuits.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/05/bt-openreach-tweaks-unbundled-llu-prices-for-uk-isps.html

UK Researchers Working to End Internet Video Buffering on ISP Connections

ISPreview: http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/uk-researchers-working-to-end-internet-video-buffering-on-isp-connections.html

Ways to connect your Sky Set top box to your Sky Router

With the additional on demand content ramping up recently on Sky it's worth while making sure your set-up is correct to get the most out of your service!

Your Sky Set top box (STB) generally has a fair few connections coming out of the back.

The green Ethernet one is the one we're interested in for on demand content coming in via broadband. First of all make sure the telephone connector / cable hasn't been shoved in this socket by accident. (I've seen this done before!) If so put it in the right socket which is the orange telephone line one. To my understanding that's important also for pin services like renting a movie on box office.

If you have nothing in the green Ethernet port then we are going to need something in there connecting back to the router to get our broadband across to the unit.

There are a number of ways to do this:

The best in my opinion is to run a Ethernet (CAT5e or CAT6) to between the two units. This can be upto about 95m-100m !!!

Another way is to get a wireless adapter for the STB and link the units wirelessly. These can be bought direct from Sky:
http://www.sky.com/products/kit/wireless-connector/index.html
I only recommend these where there isn't too much in the way off the router and the STB. A good test it to use a wireless device like a laptop / iPad where the STB is and run something like BBC iPlayer to test. If the distance is too far or there are too many think walls / too much noise from other wireless devices, then this may not be the best option for you.

For further info regarding the wireless connector: PDF

The last option is to use your electricity sockets in the home as a network to get a cabled link back to the router. For this you will need adapters in power sockets by the Sky router an STB. These can be had for around £30 and I have linked to some in the Amazon widget at the bottom of this page. See this wiki-page for a better description of the technology.

On a completely unrelated note. If you want 5.1 Surround sound from your STB remember use a  optical sound cable as Sky still don't send the surround sound down the HDMI which is disappointing!

Update: You can now get STB's with built in wifi and also as mentioned in the comments, Surround sound now can go via the HDMI.  http://www.sky.com/shop/tv/sky-plus-hd-box/

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TalkTalk returns to growth.

A small growth but with all the past issues (buying Tiscali and merging them into the fold) it's a positive sign for them.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/02/uk-isp-talktalk-returns-to-growth-with-4-053m-broadband-subscribers.html

Sky's broadband share growing!

Good to see. There is also an increase in customers taking stand alone phone and broadband which shows strength in the product on its own.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/bskyb-sky-broadband-tops-4-23-million-uk-isp-subscribers.html

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5694-sky-starting-to-challenge-virgin-media-as-second-largest-provider.html

BT's stranglehold over superfast broadband 'put Britain's digital standing at risk'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/telecoms/9803818/BTs-stranglehold-over-superfast-broadband-put-Britains-digital-standing-at-risk.html#disqus_thread

BT Openreach Confirm UK ISP Pricing for FTTP on Demand Pilot Phase 2

Although those prices are very off putting (£500 install and £1000 for a 500m run of fibre) we could see some ISP willing to subsidise this heavily with lengthy contracts. With FTTC giving 80Mbps down / 20Mbps up, people will start thinking hard about if the upgrade is worth it. 

It's a clever move by OpenReach to save money upgrading the network. I don't ever remember NTL / Telewest or their predecessors doing any thing similar on a residential; service. Hopefully it will leads to a focus on keeping the network running smoothly with better service to ISP's.

The Pilot will take place in the following exchange areas:

High Wycombe
Bristol South
St Agnes Cornwall
Edinburgh Waverley
Basingstoke
Watford
Cardiff Central
Manchester Central

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/01/bt-openreach-confirm-uk-isp-pricing-for-fttp-on-demand-pilot-phase-2.html

New blog: www.bbhelp.co.uk

I've moved some of the DSL related stuff from this site to a new dedicated blog: http://ukbroadbandblog.blogspot.co.uk/ which will eventually end up on a nice short domain:  http://www.bbhelp.co.uk (give the domain 24hrs as some DNS servers are being slow to update).

Net Index - via Speedtest.net

Here's an interesting site that shows speedtest.net & pingtest.net statistics.

http://www.netindex.com/download/

My broadband page has been updated!

I've made a few additions to the broadband page and changed the format around a bit.

Check it out:
http://www.alpagot.co.uk/p/broadband-support.html

Ripe link added to my broadband support page.

Bit surprised I left this one out to be honest!

Link: https://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db

Now on my support page: http://www.alpagot.co.uk/p/broadband-support.html

ROUND 1 : ADSL Nation XTE-2005 Vs BT I Plate

Sync speeds on the Sky Sagem phase 3 router before the I Plate:

Sync speed with the I Plate installed:

Line stats:

Take note for the noise margins (SNR margin's) and the Downstream line attenuation. 

Picture of the I Plate installed with a microfilter attached to the faceplate and a Sky TV splitter on the phone side of the microfilter.  

So there we have it, a very slight increase on what was already a good ADSL2+ line to start with.I was advised that the DLM had increased the impulse noise protection (to 2 symbols) and delay to 16ms as there was small amounts of errors passing on the line during certain times of the day. High sync speeds are great but not if the data passing on the line is unreadable by your router.

As the I Plate has a RF3 filter in I am retesting to see how this effects the line over 4-10 days. I've noticed with Sky that my SNR margins are always kept relatively low which would suggest pushing the line for a high sync speed.

It would be nice to get the line down to 8ms on the delay (interleaving!) and INP down to 1 symbol but only if the line behaves. This would make the line even better for gaming, which is already pretty amazing on this connection compared to my old Talk Talk Business (formerly Freedom2Surf) line which I had a lot of love for. That was a long line with an attenuation of around 47dB so you needed the INP / interleaving on that line more so.

You hear a lot of gamers saying that fastpath is the best approach but it almost never is these days. For gaming, if you lose any data passing on the line, the game either has to guess what is happening or re-request the data from the server which is another round trip instead of a shorter 'save' time made by the INP / delay.

ADSL Nation XTE-2005 Vs BT OpenReach I Plate

I've just had these in the post but will be testing these [See pic] over the next few days on my home connection.

New Sky DSL connection.

My new connection was put in yesterday.

Having checked my postcode on thinkbroad's map against the closest telephone exchange (straight line distance about 500meters) I was hopeful of fast speeds on ADSL. When the connection went live I connected locally into the Sky phase 3 router (Sagem) via a web browser using the internal IP of 192.168.0.1 . On the maintenance page you will find a show statistics button at the bottom which gave me the following:  



Here I could see the downstream attenuation which I could put into a attenuation calculator to see if I was near the theoretical maximum. 21,344kbps was suggested as the absolute maximum so I wasn't massively off.

It's likely that I could improve on my downstream sync speed of 17.7Mbps with a couple of tweaks such as going directly to the master socket's test socket, removing other devices from the line such as the phone and trying a different DSL filter / shorter data cable.

Next up was to try some speed testers which test throughput (Note the sync is the connection to the telephone exchange, throughput is what is passing through that connection and is effected by anything else that maybe using the connection at the same time as the test).

The results were not bad either, 14Mbps during the day is very decent. I'll take some evening reading as well to update the blog but I'm very happy for the time being. FTTC is in my area but I can't really justify the cost with these speeds having some from a long line where I had a sync of 4Mbps. It's a shame Sky don't offer static IP's but at least they have put dynDNS.org functionality into there routers which I'm told is a lot of hassel on Virgin Media who I almost had to sign up to.

Here's hoping for IPv6 functionality as well.


EDIT:
An evening speedtest result around 9pm

Update to the broadband links page

I've updated the broadband page (found on the right).

Quick link: here