Regular readers may remember previous tales of woe regarding my Internet connection. I think I might have just solved the problem. Time will tell, but for now, things are already much, much better. I’ve just increased my downstream bandwidth by 4x, and my upstream by around 3x.
I replaced the cabling.
Yep. That’s it. I replaced the light duty, multi-core phone cabling (and a joiner piece) with some 2-pair, single core phone cabling from the hardware store. I’m now getting 13000 kbps down, 800 up instead of 3000 down and 300 up.
What I thought was distance from the exchange has turned out to be bad wiring. Better cabling, and a better connection at the junction point, have drastically reduced the noise on the line, resulting in a dramatic increase in bandwidth. About $50 in parts (it’s a 30m run of cabling under the house) and an hour and a half of work has quadrupled my bandwidth. Not bad eh? It’s also cheaper than replacing the modem, which was my next option.
With luck, this will also translate into fewer dropouts; hopefully they’ll be eliminated completely. We’ll see.
To celebrate, I’m going down to the pond to take photos of the ducks. It’s an amazing day outside, so I’m stuffed if I’m going to waste it all sitting inside on the Internet.
No matter how fast it is.