Boost your broadband

When you’re used to a high-speed internet connection, it’s frustrating to find that it’s not as fast as you think it should be, and if you rely on your connection for work, or keeping in touch using services such as Facebook, Voice over IP (VoIP) or instant messaging, it can be even more annoying.

All too often, when you try complaining to an internet service provider (ISP) you’ll get poor-quality technical support or be fobbed off with a reminder that the service you’ve bought is only guaranteed to be ‘up to’ a certain speed, with no set rules about what’s contractually acceptable below that theoretical level.

But you’re not completely at the mercy of your ISP ­ – there are steps you can take to speed up your broadband connection or at least track down the real cause of problems. In this article we’re going to 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 audible sounds down the line, if you could hear crackles when you made a voice call it was a pretty safe bet that they would cause problems with your downloads too. But if you have ADSL broadband, the modem or router talks to the telephone exchange using inaudible high frequencies that co-exist on the line with your voice signals. While this means you can use the phone line at the same time as broadband, it also means problems that cause a slow connection may not be immediately obvious.

Broadband is also a lot more complicated and there are lots of different things that can slow down your connection at different places in the link between you and the rest of the internet. There could be problems with your equipment, the phone wiring in your home, the local telephone exchange or at your ISP. And if you call out a phone engineer, because you think there’s something wrong with the line, and the problem turns out to be with your equipm ent, or an extension you installed yourself, you could face a hefty call-out fee. So it pays to investigate where the problem lies first ­ – and don’t worry, it’s nowhere near as complicated as you might think, and the solutions can be simple.

The basics
According to BT, the following three guidelines are still the most important to ensure a quality ADSL broadband service:
1. Get the latest firmware for your modem and/or router. Some older firmware revisions restrict the synchronisation rate between your home and local exchange.
2. Ensure good-quality microfilters are fitted in every phone socket. BT says Sky TV boxes and fax machines are often forgotten.
3. Ensure a good standard of home wiring. Extension leads, in particular, can cause interference and restrict the abilities of your modem.

We’ll look at all these areas in detail. But as with most technical problems, always check the basic stuff first. Check that all cables are securely attached. If your connection simply cuts out, disconnect the power cable from the modem (or set-top box for some cable services), and disconnect the power from the router if you use one (simply switching these devices off isn’t enough). Leave each for 20 seconds, then restart the modem, wait a minute and restart the router and, lastly, restart the PC. With an ADSL connection you need to have a microfilter on every device that’s plugged into the phone line ­ not just phones or fax machines: burglar alarms and data modems all need a microfilter. Microfilters are very cheap, but they can also fail and cause problems, so it’s worth having a couple of spares, in case you suffer from performance issues.

BT reckons the difference in quality between different brands of microfilter doesn’t have a great effect on speed. A microfilter either works, or it doesn’t. If you experience a dramatic fall in speed or reliability over a short period of time, then it’s likely that a microfilter has died. To find the broken one replace the microfilters around the house, one at a time, and perform a speed test each time to measure performance. Replacements are available from BT for £6.84 each.

The quality of your phone wiring is important too if you use ADSL broadband. This does not apply to Virgin Media customers, but you can still have Ethernet or USB cabling problems between the modem and your router; poor connections will introduce interference, so make sure your extensions are wired up properly using good-quality cable.