Understanding the speed of your broadband service
We all want the fastest Internet connection possible but sometimes it’s hard to understand just exactly how fast or slow ones broadband service is. So this month’s Hot Tip is more of a hot titbit about what affects the speed of your Internet service. Any broadband aficionado will tell you,
it’s not as simple as A + B = C, so we’re spreading the information across two issues of amag.
In this issue we’ll explain how the distance of your house from the telephone exchange and things called attenuation and ‘noise’ can affect the speed of your service (we’ll keep it simple and low
on jargon).
Attenuation
You may not know or even care where your local telephone exchange is, but when it comes to your ADSL connection it’s probably the biggest factor affecting your service.
Why? Well it’s because of a little thing called attenuation or signal transmission loss. Take for example a car travelling from point A to point B. All things being equal, you’ll agree the car will arrive at point B with less petrol, and it’s no different with your ADSL service. The further you are from the exchange the further the data has to travel and so it loses some “petrol” or signal along the way.
In short the closer you are to your telephone exchange the faster your ADSL service.
Noise
Believe it or not your home, your suburb and even local AM radio stations make noise that affects your ADSL service. By noise, we refer to electrical interference which can be generated by many items such as your telephone device, cordless phone, fax machine and home alarms.
This noise means that ADSL equipment at the exchange has to listen harder to what your modem is communicating.
The use of a filter (which we highly recommend) can generally reduce the noise on your line, but not all the time. We also recommend that you unplug other devices on the line to test if they are creating noise on the line and slowing your connection down.
In short less noise means a faster ADSL connection.
Rain
Just when you thought it was safe to stay indoors out of the rain and browse the ‘net you find out Mother Nature has the last laugh.
We’re sorry to say but rain can affect your ADSL service. When it rains, water seeps into ‘pits’ which house your phone line. It effectively reduces the phone lines ability to communicate with the telephone exchange, just like noise on the line.
The bad news is, if you’re in an old suburb or old apartment building, you are more likely to be impacted by rain. The good news is, if you’re in a new suburb you’re less likely to be affected by the rain, though just like Mother Nature, it’s hard to predict.
In next month’s issue we’ll discuss Packet Loss, Latency, Interleaving and Domain servers. |
