Beware of factors affecting your ADSL connection speed

Like most, if you are a customer of an ADSL line you may have noticed that the actual speed reaches the connection often is far from what was contracted with the carrier. This began to be noticed when ADSLs became popular with speeds in excess of 3 Mb, especially with the famous offers up to 20 Mb ...

There are many causes that affect the final rate you get an ADSL line. There are factors both internal and external to our house, in this first attempt to explain what are the most common and how to improve our home telephone system to achieve the highest possible speed.

• The distance to the central or auxiliary node to which you connect

This is one of the main problems, and it is insurmountable. The farther we will have less speed and more connection problems, micro, oscillation of synchronous speed, etc ...

• The quality of the wiring of the telephone network.

The phone lines are still active with more than 60 years old. The copper wiring in many cases these are burned or have lost much of its properties, which deteriorate the signal quality. It can also happen to have different lengths of cable with different thicknesses and qualities, these changes also affect the performance of ADSL.

• Faults in the wiring insulation

I refer not only to cables have been damaged or lost part or all of your privacy. In many cases the city itself within 1 km of the central problems of speed is great and sometimes due to road works that join electrical cables too close to the phone creating spurious signals or poorly made connections, telephone boxes of without insulation or open, etc ...

• The contract we have with our phone carrier

Yes, it sounds truism but not the first nor the last time it happens. Not just that if we do not get hired 3 Mb to 10 Mb but that in many cases contracts have fine print about what the client may or may not do (eg Ya.com not allow the use of other hardware that is not approved by them) than the typical clause referred to access to certain content punishable by law etc ... In some cases such as usb modem in the world famous conectacte-where-when-and-like-you want to ALWAYS have download limits (2 to 3 GB) from which or drastically slow down or charge an animal for every additional MB downloaded.

• The communication protocol is used

Between our operations and our router uses a communications protocol, usually ATM, which has a high percentage of consumption of bandwidth for the line management. In most cases, this protocol is encapsulated another: PPoA (IP over ATM), PPOE (PPP over ATM), etc. ... It's very technical and we can not change, but depending on your operator is used, a No part be wasted or not the encapsulated protocol (the optimum is PPoA). We must also note that to surf the internet and download things we have to use the TCP / IP (among others) occupy up to 20% of the bandwidth available in network protocols. These are necessary to manage the source and destination of packets, error counters, forwarding of lost packets, etc ...

• The quality of the router you're using

Personally seen: it is not itself a Zyxel, a brand or Nisu Conceptronic (neither parent knows when to eat ...) that gives you your carrier. In my experience, after a change of Telefonica Ya.com, the Zyxel router having to directly give a better value and a Conceptronic rates (short, are quite similar) and much better than the SMC delivers Ya.com.

• Where is connected the router in our house

The ideal position is right next to the PTR, with a cable as short as possible. If you have connected to another room, we must keep in mind that having a lot of telephone wiring in the house acts as a radio antenna and is influenced by a multitude of electromagnetic waves that induce noise in the signal.

• The use of micro or splitter

The ADSL phone line has multiplied the need to separate ADSL in two frequency ranges of the voice data. To achieve this we use a microfilter in the phone or PTR is replaced by a Splitter. In any case, the splitter provides a better quality, but may mean you have to install new wiring. While micro-filters are installed on each phone, the splitter is installed in the driveway separating the line into two lines of your data, ie all the house phones are connected directly without the rosettes microfilter wall and the router must be connected to a specific connector that has the Splitter (in case you want to have the router in another room, would have to wire from the splitter to that room).

• The home telephone wiring

Besides referring to the age in years or the thickness and quality of the cable itself greatly influenced if the cable goes through the same corrugated tube through which electrical cables pass (This goes against the European Union's low-voltage electrical installations, but in many homes is the case). The electric cable creates an electromagnetic field that induces noise in the signal cable is on the phone.

• The PCR, PTR or Splitter

For legal purposes, the PCR is the same as a PTR or a Splitter, serves to divide the responsibilities in the event of a problem in the installation. From the street to the PTR is the responsibility of the operator, the PTR on it is your responsibility. The PCR is an older version of PTR, in fact, are exactly the same except that the latter does not bring a circuit to test the phone line. This circuit was eliminated because it causes problems with ADSL. The Splitter would be an improved version of the PTR, but in many cases not installed unless requested by the customer, accounting for a small investment, usually more than one or two microfilters.

• The operating system we're using our equipment

And I do not mean to be infected by viruses or anything, but because low-level network stacks of different operating systems give different yields. For example, I have personally verified that the stack of Linux is much more effective than Windows. A simple test, put two teams on the same network to download the same file from a P2P network, in many cases leaves Linux bandwidth to Windows.


Conclusion:

To install the most optimized our house, we should have installed a splitter instead of a PTR (if the phone line will multiply with ADSL, bone, the phone does not work for VOIP) and the router directly connected to it. Cablegram RJ45 network cable to the room where we have the equipment or to a place where we installed a network switch to provide connectivity to all computers on the network. From here we recommend at least try a GNU / Linux (novice users personally recommend Ubuntu and people with more knowledge debian ) for best results both navigation and downloads.

so u mean we need to change the wiring of our city.... right from the telephone exchange to our homes???????

Very nice. we all would sure do it.