House Broadband Strategy & Help

sportsmaster50

I have lived in my house 10 years.  I used to get 25mbs Download till about 18 months when it reduced to between 13-17 & the occasional cut out.  My job involves software presentations often by webex/skype/teams/go to meeting, my wife works for herself and sometimes has similar reqs, kids 17 & 15 (need I say more-currently homeschooling).  The village have raised up to £290k to see if we can extend the fibre line as it stops in the previous village 1 mile away, last mile is via phone lines.  We bought 1 powerline adapter about 6-7 years ago which has some success at the farthest reaches, 2 more about 3-4 years ago they don't really work, so were a failure.
So:
1) Should I reinvest in something like Devolo Magic 2 WiFi, which has 3 units but is £270 but would hopefully spread somewhere between 10 & 15?
2) "Get a man in" - is there men/women/experts in this field that can protect not improve (I don't expect that to happen!!) the download speed in house
3) Get another line into the house which would cost in the region of £250 per year (Most expensive, least liked option)
4) Wait and find out if the £290k is enough for open reach to bring cable to the village??  TBF we have already been waiting since Sept and no response as yet?
Don't think wifi mesh will cut it, powerline was ok before so that might be best if no new line, but don't know if that will be good enough.  Its something we live with because we know there are limited ways to improve without the speed into the village or the house being better.  Changing supplier won't make any difference I presume as its Open reach who own the line and that's not competitive or there is no alternative without great cost increase??
Any insight, thought, suggestions, role of person who can help, we don't know what we don't know!!!

JJ_Egan

Ethernet cabling would be my first choice .

Business use then get your employer to help pay .

Have you asked your ISP why it has dropped . Could be your internal setup .

What is coming in to the router .

Is your wifi setup for best reception ?

matelodave

The best way to get broadband around your house is with Cat6 cabling any thing else is subject to the vagaries of wireless or other electrical interference. Either in your own home of from neighbours - what speeds do you get when you use direct cabling between your router and computer?

It's quite likely that the speed drop is down to extra bandwidth consumption by others on the network. You and hundreds of thousands of other people are now working from home, not to mention on-line learning and data streaming so it's not surprising that the network gets a bit slower - it's not a lot different from the roads in that respect and requires major investment to improve the situation. 

I guess it's unlikely that OR will be spending vast amounts of money upgrading the existing copper network as they are pushing ahead with fibre to the premises (as as close to the premises as possible) and transferring the PSTN over to internet based (VoiP) which wont improve broadband speeds. Somehow you need to try and get OR motivated to extend fibre to where you live.

Is there a Rural Development programme in place? look here https://gigabitvoucher.culture.gov.uk/ and check what is going on in your area.

I live in Cambridgeshire, a fair way from the nearest town and we only got around 1.8mbit's, so we had a concerted effort about 4-5 years ago, involving Cambridge County Council's, "Connecting Cambridgeshire" programme. It took about 18 months, lot's of trying to get residents to badger CCC, I did multiple leaflet drops, door to door canvassing and attended several CCC meetings  but it paid off in the end and we got FTTP up and running about three years ago. (I became what CCC called a Broadband Champion to keep the pressure up on both CCC and the residents)
We can now get up to 900mbit's if we so desire (I'm more than happy with 76). There was a fair amount of civils involved, laying ducts, unblocking ducts and about four miles of overhead fibre which took the best part of a year from start to finish.

Cisco001

If the speed of your incoming speed is slow, having mesh wifi will not help.
Have you check the speed of internet with PC plug in?

If you cannot get faster download/ upload speed with ISP, you could probably try mobile data to see if it is faster.

Mickey666

I agree with the above comments about Ethernet cabling being the best way to get internet connectivity around a house.  It's fast and it's cheap.  The obvious downside is how to hide the cabling (if that sort of thing bothers you).

It would be interesting to know what has caused the approximate halving of the OP's download speed over the past 18 months and the router sync speed might be be a clue (as reported within the router management pages).  If this is still up around 25Mbps then increased local use and congestion might be the culprit as suggested.  But if the sync speed has dropped then that might be indicative of a wiring fault somewhere, which is not unheard of.  I had that once and the OpenReach guy who came to investigate swapped our telephone line onto some spare pairs from the cabinet to our master socket and increased the speed significantly.

A second line would not necessarily increase speed but it would of course increase bandwidth.  There are router products that can use multiple lines to 'aggregate' bandwidth and increase overall speed, but they tend to be commercial/industrial devices with price tags to match.

Very impressed with matelodave's fibre initiative though!   I've often wondered about DIY/volunteering to help with the really expensive part of physically pulling or hanging optical cable to our local cabinet so we could get FTTP instead of just FTTC, but since we already get about 28Mbps that's fast enough for my needs.  But if I was stuck with something less than 2Mbps as matelotdave was then I'd definitely go for it.  Very encouraging to learn that such things are possible and kudos to him for making it happen!.

matelodave

What I found when trying to get ours upgraded was that there had to be a determined campaign by as as many people as possible, writing in and making requests. Just one or two people expressing a need or want is not the same as lots and lots, all individually sending E-mails and requests for a faster service. We didn't have to raise any money either.

Connecting Cambridgeshire supplied me with a couple of hundred leaflets and I printed out several news bulletins to keep people motivated to make requests. Our hamlet is only around 100 houses spread over a mile or so with no access to anywhere else (its a long cul-de-sac) It is about three miles from the nearest cabinet and five miles from the exchange but we now have fibre right up to the very end. 

I did the same where we used to live down in Essex, so we could expedite the initial installation of broadband whilst we were still on dial-up.

Lots of canvassing, leaflet drops (I printed some of my own and got the suppliers to provide me with several thousand as well) - I personally delivered around 3,000 and literally spoke to hundreds of people, getting a petition sorted out and even discussing it with our local MP. However, in the end, what gets the suppliers motivated is an indication of pent up demand from lots of people rather than just one or two vociferous ones.