Re-provisioning a line from another exchange

I have been told after the last engineer visit that we are simply too far from St Albans exchange for ADSL to work.

Whilst I would query the 'too far' bit, I do accept that the quality of the lines are so poor that I am unlikely to get a service from St Albans at the moment.

I am frustrated that the 'V' cable to my local cabinet is so poor that at just over 4km the line loss is 61dB. I also do not quite understand how myself and neighbours have had service (for significant periods of time) but it now appears impossible to provide one now.

The engineers that visited to check my line did state that we are actually closer to the Garston exchange than St Albans and he had got a neighboor working from that exchange just recently.

We are going to try and get the line re-provisioned from Garston rather than St Albans

Limiting ADSL to 512Kbits

Andrews and Arnold are trying to lock my ADSL service down to 512K in the hope this will enable my modem to synchronise. I have power cycled the modem and am now waiting to see if this has had any effect.

Home 250 - A last resort for BT ADSL?

Most ADSL offerings these days are 'rate adaptive' - they train to the highest speed possible on your telephone line. BT offers their ADSL MAX product which will give speeds up to 8Mbit/sec depending upon line length & quality.

Unfortunately some very long or poor quality lines just cannot support this service and ADSL will fail to synchronise even at 512kbit/sec. Sometimes the BT Home 250 product which is tied down to working at 250kbit/sec will work on these lines. It is possible that if the Home 250 service works then line statistics can be measured and it may be possible for an ISP to get enough information about your line to make some improvements with BT and achieve an upgrade to 'full' ADSL.

Home 250 is supplied by the following ISPs and probably a few more besides.

Andrews & Arnold
Zen Internet
Merula
Zetnet

Urban Wimax active in London

I am quite hopeful about the prospects for WiMAX as an alternative to wires for the last mile delivery of broadband services to premises outside the reach of current ADSL implementations.

Whilst they don't yet cover St Albans, Urban WiMAX offer WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) based broadband services to (business) customers in London, UK. I am a bit confused as to why they don't offer service here as WiMAX has a stated range up to 30 miles and last time I checked we are only about 16 miles from central London.

Urban WiMAX provide symetric broadband up to 10Mbit/s (range dependent) and offer 'carrier c;ass' SLAs with minimal contention (according to their webiste).

The price (£99/month according to this document) is nearer to SDSL than ADSL and means it is suited to businesses which need the high service levels and symetric bandwidth rather than being a general replacement for ADSL at the moment. Hopefully the cost will fall over time.

Andrews & Arnold ADSL Tech Support

We are currently working with Andrews & Arnold to install ADSL.

Whilst we are not actually getting anywhere with the ADSL installation I am very impressed with the A&A technical support team. I have spoken with a couple of their engineers and they are always technically knowledgeable. One engineer seems to be assigned to a case so I can always talk to the same person rather than explaining over and over that I have already rebooted the router.

Currently BT have placed a fail against the line even though the length is listed as just 5.3KM which should be within limits for ADSL.

They are also great at calling me with status updates - even if it just to say that they have not heard anything from BT yet but they are chasing. A&A are reluctant to let this go and are pursuing BT for further investigation and still have some options to pursue.

I obviously cannot comment on the quality of their broadband (yet) but I can say they give excellent Technical Support!

Another visit -another failure

We have had an ADSL engineer out again to the premises and it is not looking hopeful.

He seemed pretty competent - he even tried bunching pairs from the exchange to the cab to try and get a better signal. So far no synch light though.

He confirmed there are 'issues' with customers served from the cabinet (cabinet 96 apparently) and they are beginning to suspect a problem in the cabinet itself. I know that there is only a 'V' cable to the cabinet (whatever this is) and that means there is a poor signal even at the cabinet. Given that there is possibly 2KM more (poor quality) cable to our house I am not sure we are ever going to get ADSL unless they fix the wiring to the cabinet or start installing miniDSLAMs in the cabinets.

ADSL Over 5kms

OK, I have been struggling to get ADSL at my address on the outskirts of St Albans (BT exchange LBNSTB) for several years now.

We are just south of St Albans and live about 1km down a lane serviced by cable up poles (with a couple of dives underground to avoid overhead power cables). Unfortunately the BT exchange is located just on the north side of town and therefore our measured line length is about 5.3km.

I wanted a spot to document my efforts to get ADSL, partly to help me remember what I have tried, but I also hope it may help others to get ADSL on their marginal line.

I want to make it clear I am not in this to bash BT - I think they do a good job (I also still own a few shares from the old privatisation days). It is just that with the current state of the market and the technology it is not feasible to make ADSL available to all.

I want to understand the factors that might prevent you getting ADSL on a long line and what you can do to mitigate these factors.

I currently have broadband - via a two-way satellite link which cost about £1800 to install, £69 per month to rent and is probably not as good as a £14.99 512Kb/s ADSL link. I am happy with satellite compared with the old dial up connection I had, but to run an it consultancy and internet educational toy store from home really requires something a little quicker.