I often hear people complaining about their “wifi”, “broadband” or provider and asking “who is the best supplier?”.
The following article attempts to explain, in laymen’s terms, where you need to look to resolve specific issues and what might affect your connection (Starting from the exchange and working towards your home.)
Broadband is the provision of data services using beyond-hearing frequencies on the phone line. It does not inlcude WiFi.
WiFi is the transmission of data using defined standards over radio waves.
It does not include the connection to the provider.
The hub provided by your supplier is a broadband modem (converts data into frequencies), router(determines data direction), firewall (controls data access) and wifi hub(provides radio services) in one unit.
The information here relates to broadband and wifi.. not to “cable” services such as those provided by VirginMedia (NTL) – not that anyone in a rural community can get “cable”.
The exchange
The vast majority of people with broadband have a copper cable connection (the standard phoneline) which runs from your house to a cabinet, then to the exchange.
Even if you have “fibre broadband” this means (in the vast majority of cases) that the broadband is backed by fibre optic-cables (high capacity) at the exchange or, at best, the cabinet….but not to your house unless you were specifically provided with FTP (Fibre To Premises) which is rare.
Each exchange is owned by BT and they lease space in that exchange to other providers (Internet Service Providers, or ISPs).
In Ramsey, where I live, there are only 3 providers:
- BT
- Talktalk (which is AOL/Tiscali)
- Sky
Regardless of whom you pay for your services, the actual underlying connectivity is handled by one of these. Other companies buy bandwidth from these 3 and resell it. The actual providers vary at each exchange.
The service is backhauled (linked back) via other exchanges, for instance Talktalk in Ramsey backhauls via Doddington. (yes despite Doddington being a smaller location, the fibre goes this way). We know this because a recent outage was caused for all TalkTalk customers when the fibre was damaged at Dodddington.
Your cabling / connection
Fibre or copper cabling will carry the connection to the cabinet (those big green boxes at the side of the road) and then a cable containing copper wires runs to your house.
The quality and length of this connection significantly impacts what ‘speed’ you can get. The longer the copper cable run, the more the signal degrades.
Any poor terminations, damage or loose wires will also make a significant difference.
Your connection is contended, this means that the bandwidth provided is shared with other users. Usually at around between 20 and 50 to 1. This means that you could only get 1 20th of the speed you expect. Unless your provided offers a guarenteed speed you will see the speed decrease at peak times. Problems with this dropping to an unusable speed are becoming more rare.
You can usually check the connection speed on the router summary page or you can use an online bandwidth checker. Only ever test the bandwidth online from a cabled connection (plugged in to the router) otherwise you are testing the bandwidth over wifi and broadband, not just the broadband (see below).
Your Wifi
The easiest way to explain how wifi works is to say that it is like shouting in a room. The more poeple there are and the more background noise the harder it is to get your message through….
When your device tries to talk to something else it has to compete with all the other devices for an opportunity to talk. The more devices there are, the more this congestion causes problems.
Not only do your devices compete, but other people’s wifi may be operating on the same(or overlapping) frequency that your’s is. Their devices therefore also eat into your available airtime.
The wifi radio range is split into channels. On the most frequently used system channels overlap causing interference. Your wifi hub should automatically choose a channel based on the least interference – however a lot of hubs are very bad at this, especially the ‘free’ ones provided by ISPs.
You can change the channel in the hub settings, but there is no point doing this without first finding out what channels are in use. You can do this with a wifi scanner such as inSSIDer. (Beyond the scope of this article).
Wifi signals are degraded significantly by obstacles such as walls, windows (double glazing in particular because of the metals used in the glass), water (including rain) and other things that emit similar frequencies. The higher the frequency the more this is likely to affect them so, ironically, newer faster speed wifi is likely to acheive less range.
Distance from the hub, interference, number of devices, obstacles and the positioning of the antennas will all make a difference to how fast, how reliable and well your wifi performs.
Conclusion
Why is my provider slow? Why is wifi slow? Why is broadband slow?
It depends on a lot of things:
- ISP’s ability to provide suffcient bandwidth for all of it’s customers
- The quality of the physical cabling to your house
- The quality of the router/hub being used
- The interference and obstacles on your wifi
- The number of devices you (and your neighbours) have on the wifi
- How much your connection is being used
- The bandwidth of the other end of whatever you are connecting to (netflix, amazon..whatever)
What to do
Slow file transfer, buffering or lag
Check the bandwidth being acheived at the router, using a cabled connection to the router and an online speed checker; or log in to the router and look at the connection summary page.
Connection speed issues from the router are ususally down to the quality of the line or the bandwdith provided by your ISP, you need to contact the ISP.
If your speed is fast on the cabled connection but slow on wifi then the issue is either that the hub is not working (or not good enough) or that (more likely) your signal is suffering interference either because of obstacles (walls, etc) or wifi collisions. Check channel availability using a wifi scanner (available on app-stores) or use inSSIDer on your laptop.
Better wifi hubs will undoubtedly provide better channel switching, interference detection and often include ‘beam-forming’ features which adjust the power on each of the antennas to direct the power towards the client. Enterprise solutions such as those by cisco are very clever, but too expensive for most domestic customers… ubiquity, tp-link, dlink and netgear are usually quite good. Free routers from ISPs are usually quite lame.
Of course don’t forget that if you try to download too much at a time, this will result in congestion, just like with a road.
WiFi drops out
This is usually due to interference (see above). If you can use the connection reliably from a cabled connection then the issue is with the wifi.
Broadband drops out
If the broadband drops out, reconnects, drops out, reconnects. Then usually this means that the line is unreliable. This often happens when you are a long way from the exchange and the signal is not strong enough. Contact your ISP, the equipment at the exchange self-throttles it’s power output to the lowest level it thinks it can get away with. The ISP can increase this to stablise the connection (within a certain margin). Often they will do this… and then it will work for a while before the equipment self-throttles again and ruins it.
Changing providers is unlikely to help unless the underlying problem is solved.
If you live next door to someone that doesnt have this problem then there may be a physical issue with your line.
Remember this applies to the broadband connection… not the wifi, that is a different issue.
Connection drops and lindline doesn’t work
If the landline doesn’t work this indicates a problem with the cabling. Either a wire is loose, disconnected or shorted out.
Make sure you don’t have any extensions plugged in. (BT will use this as an excuse) and test that you can make a call.
If you can’t make a call (or the line is noisy) using a phone connected to the BT master socket then the line is bad. You need to contact your ISP, but bear in mind that the copper cabling is owned by BT and your ISP will have to get BT to look at it. Good luck with that!
Author information
Please see https://blog.stevesutton.net/about-the-author-steve-sutton/