Broadband Upgrade - Prices Published
General April 29th, 2008
So, I was a little out with my estimates in one of my previous posts. Â Cable & Wireless has finally published the prices of their (still to be) upgraded broadband service. The good news is that the prices are lower than I thought it would be:
2Mb:  £24.99
4Mb:  £49.99
8Mb:  £79.99
The bad news is that this is still far more expensive that offerings from the UK. Â Also, the standard that the Guernsey is being upgraded to should be able to support 8Mb download and 1Mb upload, however the 8Mb Pro service has an upload limit of 768Kb. Â I make that 25% below what it could be.
I’m sure lots of people will be saying “better late than never” but is this really enough of an offering to keep us competitive in the current digital climate?  I wonder what the (not so) wonderful OUR has to say about it?
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To be honest, I’m more fed up of the service not working suitably. Granted I’ve been away for the last year or so and maybe missed some of the details, but the upgrade to ADSL2 has brought havoc to the home network I installed for my parents - random lockups 2 or 3 times that can only be solved with a hard reboot. I’ve tried everything to get things working, and I’m at a loss. Short of replacing the main router, I’m out of ideas. I’m interested to know if C&W, erm, Sure (how dumb is that?!) made suitable fore-warnings to their customers that there was a real danger their existing hardware wouldn’t be compatible with the new service.
If they’re using a separate router I fail to see how that would cause their computer to lock up. If they’re not using a separate router I would advise they get one.
As for the C&W upgrade, they’re not upgrading to ADSL2, just increasing the speed of their ADSL(1) service.
What is really annoying me is that I am in the first area that should have been upgraded but I’m still at the old slow speed. And I’m less than 1km from the exchange so I should (in theory) be able to get the 8Mb service.
It is ADSL2 - the IT support chap at C&W told me so… and it’s not computer lockups - it’s router lockups. Well not so much lockups, just some sort of DNS problem - the router is still functional but refusing to dish out Internet.
I haven’t totally ruled out hardware issues as the cause - but checking all the filters, line tests, firmware upgrades on the router, and various other hacks, not to mention that problems started occurring around the time they started upgrading the exchanges and I’ve spoken to friends who are having similar issues, makes it seem just a little too cowinkidental for me…
Hmm, that’s odd, one of the engineers told me it definitely wasn’t ADSL 2 and that they were also disappointed with the equipment they have bought. Someone is telling pork pies!
I don’t suppose the problems started at the time of the power surge? Also have you checked the connection protocols. If it is ADSL2 then the setting on the old ADSL support pages are going to be wrong. If, what I’ve heard about the new C&W equipment is true, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the problem is at the exchange end and not the router.
I spent some time on the phone with C&W support this afternoon. For starters, he re-confirmed to me it was ADSL2 - so yep, someone somewhere has got their wires crossed (no pun intended). I tend to believe it IS ADSL2, as I thought ADSL1 couldn’t support the faster speeds.
Anyway, we confirmed that it was (likely) nothing to do with anything at our end, and that it’s vaguely to do with ADSL2 being more sensitive to noise on the line. And since I’m 3.2km from the exchange, with a higher than recommended number of phones attached to the line, that was (probably) the cause. He was able to switch some profile, which although potentially decreasing the speed of the connection, would make the connection more tolerant of the noise. He had some fancy term for the problem, which in my head was heard as “signal to noise”. Which kinda makes sense.
I don’t know, I still think there’s a DNS problem somewhere, but for the timebeing everything is up and running. The real test will be tomorrow morning if everything is still up and playing nicely as every day for the last 2 weeks it has been down when I get up in the morning.
Don’t let the speed fool you. The ADSL 1 standard supports speeds up to 8Mb which is what the new maximum in Guernsey is.