Speed up your broadband connection

Broadband internet connections are great when they’re working properly but they can also be a source of frustration. Slow internet access is a pain when you want to surf the web or send some emails, and if you rely on your internet connection for work or making phone calls it can be a huge problem.

Sadly, complaining to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) won’t always yield the results you want ­ we often hear of readers getting poor technical support or being fobbed off with a reminder that their service is only guaranteed ‘up to’ a certain speed. You are not, however, completely at the mercy of telephone support.

In fact there are several steps you can take to speed up your ADSL broadband connection, or at the very least track down the real cause of the problems. In this article we’ll show exactly what you can do to get back online and back up to speed.

Diagnose the problem
In the days of dial-up modems, solving problems was pretty easy. Since they relied on sending sounds down the line, you could literally listen out for the problem: if you could hear crackles when you made a call it was a pretty safe bet that this would cause problems.

With ADSL broadband, though, the modem or router talks to the telephone exchange using high frequencies that you can’t hear. This means you can use the phone line at the same time as the internet, but it also means problems that cause a slow connection may not be obvious.

Cable broadband is far simpler, with fewer troubleshooting options available.

Broadband is also more complicated than a dial-up connection, so there are lots of different things that can slow down your connection. There could be problems with your equipment, the phone wiring in your home, the local telephone exchange or at your ISP.

If you call out a phone engineer because you think there is something wrong with the line, only to find that the problem is really with your equipment, you could face a hefty call-out fee. So it pays to investigate where the problem lies first ­ and don’t worry, doing this is nowhere near as complicated as you might think.

The basics
According to BT, there are three basic things that you should do to ensure the best ADSL broadband service.

The first is easy: check that microfilters (the little white boxes that split the phone line between broadband and calls) are fitted into every phone socket. BT says the connections used by Sky TV boxes and fax machines are often forgotten.