K

Broadband fixed!

OK, this will be the last techie blog post for a while because I will have run out of tips! It concerns our recent broadband woes, and the simplest of cheap and easy fixes.

We've been with the normally excellent O2 broadband for nearly 3 years now, and have been benefiting from the cheap rate of £7.50 for 8Mbps (no need for more speed, is there?!). Unfortunately, the quality of the connection suddenly deteriorated last month, and led to disconnects every 5 minutes or less, which lasted for nearly a week before I got it fixed. This was happening regardless of usage intensity, and didn't seem to be a busted ADSL filter as a new one didn't help. Now, the wiring in our block of flats is terrible - both mains electrics and telephone lines. We had two completely random phone numbers that connected to our phone line at first, and a whole load of Caribbean-sounding people kept getting confused when we answered the phone and not their auntie, so something was seriously wrong. Whilst it had been stable for a few years, it was still in the back of my mind that some kind of interference/wiring cock-up on the line could have caused the problem. Through a bunch of different websites, I came across this: the iPlate. Annoying name, but apparently the 'i' stands for 'interstitial', because it goes between two bits of your phone socket. It's essentially a filter that blocks the bell wire on your phone line, which is a common source of noise and is no longer necessary. I believe this wire can carry sufficient power to ring the mechanical bells inside old-school phones. You don't need it, so the iPlate gets rid of it, and possibly does some other fancy filtering also.

It cost me just under £8 from eBay and was not difficult to install. Here's how it is goes in (it's the part in the middle, the rest is just the original socket):

And here's how it sits in our seriously grim-looking master socket:

It worked instantly. No more disconnects since then, and our speed has gone up - about 800bps faster download and 200bps faster upload. More importantly, we can watch BBC iPlayer without any dropouts.

If you're happy with your broadband then you've no need for this, but if you are having problems with stability or speed then something this cheap and simple is at least worth trying.