Slow rural broadband - upload>download / satellite broadband

electric_badger

Hi,

My wife and I have just moved to a small village which is 4km as the crow flies from our local exchange - an exchange which serves over 1,300 homes and has not been upgraded for SDSL, ADSL2+ or LLU. We get broadband through Sky and don't get 3G in the village. Virgin have no plans to install cable here.

We get less than 0.2Mb download through Sky, but bizarrely speedtest.net claims we get 0.75Mb upload - which tallies with our experience of it - sending emails with attachments for example is much faster than receiving them. BT claim they could get us up to 0.3Mb but I'm inclined not to bother switching as going through all the hassle for such a small uplift is barely worth it (plus we're bundled with a TV package).

I work from home regularly and my wife is in the process of setting up her own business, so we need a decent connection and hence are thinking of satellite broadband as an option. However, we want to exhaust all other options before forking out for installation and a 2-year contract.

Firstly, is it usual to get much faster (i.e. Double or even treble) upload than download speeds, and is this a potential indication of a fault on the line?

Secondly, how can we go about lobbying BT Wholesale to upgrade the exchange to LLU or other services, and is it even worth it?

Finally, does anyone else have any experience of satellite broadband and have any views they might want to share with us?

Many thanks in advance for any help, and apologies for the lengthy post!

Cheers
Jon

Mark_In_Hampshire

Before going any further, have you checked 3G availability on all the networks?

You might find this interesting:
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3421281

Long shot, but would you happen to be connected to the Bentley exchange in Hampshire? (c. 1300 premises)

electric_badger

Thanks Mark - I did see that thread - but based on their coverage checkers none of the major networks give us 3G. I'm trying to find friends who use those networks so we can try the coverage out for real.

Annoying that Sky don't offer broadband through their dish anymore otherwise we could get satellite broadband through them....

I'm based in Warwickshire, near Rugby....

penrhyn

AFAIK Sky never offered a satellite based broadband service, could you expand?

OP Could you post your router line statistics?

kwikbreaks

I can't help with your questions about satellite but on ADSL a downstream slower than upstream doesn't indicate a fault. The way ADSL works is that the lower frequencies get used for upstream and the higher ones for downstream. The high frequencies suffer more attenuation than the lower ones and progressively with distance the highest usable frequency gets lower and lower (which is why long lines are slower - there is less RF bandwidth available to carry the data).

All you can do to improve things is to ensure your internal wiring is optimised. For absolute best results ditch all extensions and just have a single filter at the master socket and run any phones from that filter. You can retain hard wired extensions if you use a filtered faceplate and you might even get away with running the router on a pair from the unfiltered connection filtered faceplates provide.

Swapping provider won't bring any benefit as they'll all be using the same phone line. Some routers will work marginally better than others but as this can vary depending on the exchange equipment it would be a case of suck it and see plus I think the Sky contract says you have to use the supplied router anyway.

Good luck with the satellite as I suspect that will indeed be your only short term option until rural wireless products become available.

macman

'Secondly, how can we go about lobbying BT Wholesale to upgrade the exchange to LLU or other services, and is it even worth it?'

It's not BT who upgrade to LLU, it's the LLU providers who pay for opening up an exchange to their equipment.Unless there are enough potential customers for them on that exchange, they won't be interested, as they'd never earn their investment back. On an exchange of just 1,300 subscribers, it's never going to happen.