How do I know the max. speed of my line?

DaBreno

Howye folks. After many years of waiting, Eircom have upgraded my exchange to enable Broadband. Im also within the 5Km limit. Is there a way I can run a test on my line to see what condition its in? There are a few attractive looking packages offering 5-6Mb services and Id like to know if my line is actually capable of that before shelling out for em.

Cheers!

dub45

DaBreno wrote:

Howye folks. After many years of waiting, Eircom have upgraded my exchange to enable Broadband. Im also within the 5Km limit. Is there a way I can run a test on my line to see what condition its in? There are a few attractive looking packages offering 5-6Mb services and Id like to know if my line is actually capable of that before shelling out for em.

Cheers!

The first thing to do is check if your line actually passes the bb test! afaik it is not possible for the user to check the quality of the line until there is a bb signal on the line.

CuLT

Call up a telco sales department and ask them to tell you what speed your line is capable of taking. Failing that, call their tech support department and ask them.

dub45

CuLT wrote:

Call up a telco sales department and ask them to tell you what speed your line is capable of taking. Failing that, call their tech support department and ask them.

I had thought of suggesting this in my post but it will really be a matter of luck with the person you get at the other end of the line as to whether they will bother to really check it out for you. There have been several reports on here of people being allowed to sign up for products that their lines were just not capable of sustaining. It is not just a matter of distance from the exchange either - you have to take into account the actual physical quality of your line and even possibly the internal wiring in your house.

My advice would be get a low speed make sure that works for you - you can sort out your line stats and see if you can get a higher speed on your line - afaik there is no charge for an upgrading but there is a charge for downgrading.


Have a read of these:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/linestats.htm
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/lowSNR.htm

lucernarian

The maximum speeds which eircom and other resellers quote are based on attenuation values. In most circumstances, they are accurate but lines which are unusually noisy (e.g. caused by stuff on the line which are filtered poorly or water leakage after downpours) will have problems.

You're right, but importantly, customers wouldn't have been signed up if eircom knew exactly how the line would behave with higher-speed ADSL on it.

DaBreno

Ok, I'll give one of em a ring and see what their tech dept has to say about my line. Shame there no handy software I could download to run that kind of a test for me.

Thanks for the rplies.