garan.org

ADSL24 allowed me to pay on my Capital One card with no extra fees and setup a recurring payment. That's an extra 4% back on this month and next month's bills followed by 1% back ongoing when my initial 3 month bonus period ends with Capital One. Nice.

I've been with the geeky ISP, Andrews and Arnold, for the last couple of years and been happy with the service that I get. I've never used the huge IPV6 or VoIP services that they gave me for nothing though. I pay a premium as it costs £39.99 per month for my ADSL service, which gives me 8Mb down, 832kb up, 3GB per month peak usage and unlimited off peak.

I'm trying to cut a few of the recurring monthly costs at the moment, one of which is a second BT line which used to be a dedicated business line. The problem I've got is that the ADSL is on the business line. To move lines I need to pay the BT Wholesale standard conncection fee of £34.86 +VAT to get the other line activated. It's a little more annoying as that line used to have ADSL on it but it was turned off when I migrated to A&A.

ADSL24 get good reports on DSL Zone, only have a one month minimum contract period and don't add £12 profit on the connection fee like A&A do. So I'm going to give it a go and see what it's like. ADSL migrations between ISPs is free so I've not got a great deal to lose if I find it isn't good.

ADSL24's Office 45 product gives me 45GB per month of peak traffic (A&A are giving me 3GB) along with 300GB of off-peak traffic per month (A&A are giving me unlimited off-peak but I've never gone over 100GB in a month total at anytime over the last year). ADSL24 include 8 static IP addresses too.

My ADSL was down for 24 hours yesterday. Not really sure why as Freedom2Surf's support ain't exactly great. I've decided to move to Andrews and Arnold (aka the techie geek's ISP!). I ordered my connection this morning and the order is already with BT (notified by SMS). Should have it within 5 days. Rather than apply for a migration code from my existing ISP I've requested that the service be activated on my second BT line. It'll mean that the services overlap, costing me a bit more, but I won't go without my connection for days on end.

I'm getting between 2Mb and 6Mb at the moment. It's fluctuating a lot and I've asked my ISP to tell me why.

Just been looking at what I should be expecting to see bandwidth-wise with my upcoming ADSL speed upgrade. Found this article: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/433293.html

Noise Margin (AKA Signal to Noise Margin or Signal to Noise Ratio)
Relative strength of the DSL signal to Noise ratio. The higher the number the better for this measurement. In some instances interleaving can help raise the noise margin to an acceptable level.

6dB or below is bad and will experience no synch or intermittent synch problems
7dB-10dB is fair but does not leave much room for variances in conditions
11dB-20dB is good with little or no synch problems* (but see note below)
20dB-28dB is excellent
29dB or above is outstanding

* Note that there may be short term bursts of noise that may drop the margin, but due to the sampling time of the management utility in your modem, will not show up in the figures.

Line Attenuation
Measure of how much the signal has degraded between the DSLAM and the modem. This is largely a function of the distance from the exchange. The lower the dB the better for this measurement.

20dB and below is outstanding
20dB-30dB is excellent
30dB-40dB is very good
40dB-50dB is good
50dB-60dB is poor and may experience connectivity issues
60dB or above is bad and will experience connectivity issues


My current stats are a downstream (i.e. receive) noise margin of 28.68db and an attenuation of 20.11db. That should give me more or less the full 8Mb.

Extrapolating that data further and looking towards ADSL2+, I should be able to get around 20Mb downstream. That was gleaned from the graph at http://adsl.yesyes.info/modules/xoopsfaq/index.php?cat_id=2.

Thanks for your help Dave :)

Just had an email telling me that my regrade is happening on the 10th February. That's this Friday. Whoopee!