8Mbps Broadband

I get my internet access from Zen. I have been with them for almost 3 years and they have been most excellent.

I originally had a 1/2mbps ADSL connection with them, growing to 1mbps and then 2mbps. All the time I have been with them I have never had any speed variances or dropped connections. In fact until this month my ADSL connection has been up for 103 days!!!

BT have recently upgraded all (except 106) their exchanges to support ADSL Max. This means that I can now get an 8mbps ADSL connection with a 468kbps uplink. Excellent. The only downside with upgrading my Zen connection is that I am limited to 50GB per month download. Not a problem as I normally download about 30GB per month so there is plently of space available.

My faster connection went live last Tuesday. I looked at the sync speed on my router and it was happily sat at 8192kb. Most excellent!!!

Unfortunatly I was still only downloading at 2mb. My uplink was much quicker but download speeds were the same as normal.

Looking at the Zen forums it appears that it can take 3 - 10 days for your connection to settle down. It could also be 3 days before BT remove your bandwidth cap to allow the extra speed.

After a week of testing I seem to get connection speeds that vary from 0.9mbps to 7.5mbps. This seems to change depending on the time of day, and I don't mean it is a congestion issue. My connection at 06:59 is just under 1mbps and at 07:01 is between 6 and 7mbps. Every day it changes at the same time. Very strange. My router is also showing disconnects and line errors. Not good!!!

I'm a little dissappointed by my new ADSL connection. I don't think it is Zen's fault for a moment as they are depending on BT to provide the service but I still feel let down.

Hopefully things will get better by the end of the week. For now though if you are thinking of upgrading I'd wait. This is new technology with BT at the helm which is never a good thing.

I'll keep you informed of any changes.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I shall wait a while then. Let me know how it goes.

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