Broadband in small village?

Horizon81

Approx 4 to 5 miles from the town named on that BT checker site.

There's a cabinet at the top of the village, about half a mile from me. How on earth do you know exactly where the exchange is?

EDIT - I've been reliably informed it's approx 7km.

penrhyn

Really 7 km?

Give the mapping feature a go on Samknows, it should report the approx distance from your exchange.

kwikbreaks

Horizon81 wrote: »

So basically.... they'd run it for a few weeks, then fix it. Potentially at 200kbps?

No. On rate adaptive (which just about all ADSL is theses days) it can and will vary from time to time.

All that happens in the first 10 days different from the rest of the time you are on the service is that the lowest sync rate gets recorded so it can be used in future to determine if a speed drop is classed as a fault or not (it has to be 70% lower or BT just shrug their shoulders and say tough).

I didn't recommend Sky because their support is offshore as is BTs and you may have some problems and often offshore support does not go beyond suggesting changing filters and rebooting the router. Of course you may get lucky and get a rep who actually understands the product (s)he is supporting but the odds are not good. To find out why I didn't recommend TalkTalk have a look through this forum.

brewerdave

Notice you can get O2LLU -If you have an o2 mobile this is a good value package _ £8.17 per month -first 3 months free ! Worth enquiring.

macman

Worst case-you only get 512KBps. That's still 10 times faster than dial up.
When I got my first broadband connection it was that speed, and I couldn't believe how fast it seemed.
There's still a lot you can do on that speed that you can't do on dial up.

soupdragon10

I was in this situation and was initially told that I would never be able to have broadband as I was too far from the exchange. BT changed their minds are 6 months and we have this and it is certainly much better than dial up (where you could make a coffee while pages loaded).

Our exchange is due for upgrade in May so hoping that we might get a small increase in speed. I am still with BT as I negotiated an Option 3 unlimited download package for £10 per month which is not bad value.

Owain_Moneysaver

macman wrote: »

Worst case-you only get 512KBps. That's still 10 times faster than dial up.

... and doesn't tie up the phone line when you're online.

You can make a slow connection more usable if you selectively disable images, adverts, flash, etc in the browser.

spannerzone

anything faster than dialup has to be worth a shot!

other optionc could be 3g dongle broadband (may not have coverage)

I'd check sam knows exchange mapping and see what that brings up.

kwikbreaks

spannerzone wrote: »

I'd check sam knows exchange mapping and see what that brings up.

Post #5 gave that info.

3G is likely a pipedream as small villages are usually miles away from cells but as you say worth a look.

spannerzone

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Post #5 gave that info.

3G is likely a pipedream as small villages are usually miles away from cells but as you say worth a look.

sorry, i meant that samknows does 'an expected speed' mapping facility that shows what you might expect to get realistically, speed wise, rather than the other exchange options that show in post 5

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_mapping

enter your postcode, click the exchange icon to show its predicted coverage, click your house location to get expected speeds.

i find today it won't show my home address fore some reason though.