Is your broadband speed slower than you'd hoped?
Have you run a broadband speedtest above, and found out your broadband speeds aren't quite what you had hoped? Well there are several reasons why your connection may not be running as fast as you'd like. Here are some reasons and possible solutions that may exist.
Please note: If you are a Freeola customer experiencing broadband problems over your BT telephone line, BT require statistics from their own speed monitoring tool before they investigate any problem with your line. Please visit
http://speedtester.bt.com/ for this.
Distance From Your Local Exchange:
Generally, the further your premises (where your broadband connection is located) is situated from your local telephone exchange, the slower your connection will go. Broadband users in a urban area will typically have faster connections to that of users in a more rural location. Moving house is a bit extreme though, right?
See how far you are from your local exchange (external link).
Quality of Internal Wiring:
Another major influence into the speed of your connection is the quality of the cabling/wiring within the premises of where your broadband connection resides, e.g. your home or office. The only possible solution to this, as you can probably tell, is an expensive one of getting internal wiring re-wired. This could potentially be very costly and time-consuming though, and offers no guarantee of improving your broadband speed.
Broadband Equipment:
There are several bits of equipment that could help to improve your connection speed. Firstly, you'll currently be using either an ADSL Modem or an ADSL Router. The more recent routers and modems tend to support higher speeds.
Browse Broadband Equipment at the Freeola Shop.
You may also have heard about the BT iPlate, which is a simple device that plugs into your phone socket, and works to improve broadband speed by cutting out interference from the 'bell wire', used to create the ringing sound on old phones. You can read more with our BT iPlate Guide or buy an iPlate for £9.99 from the Freeola Shop.
Other possible solutions for slower connections:
- Use Anti-Virus software that won't slow down your browsing, such as Eset Anti-Virus when scanning.
- Where possible, use a wired network in your home or office as opposed to a wireless network. This improves not only speed, but security too.
- Turn off unecessary programs on your computer when they aren't in use, such as P2P clients and music/tv streaming players.
