How fast is your Broadband? Are you getting what you pay for?

As you may know the Chrishall exchange - which serves the Chishills - has been upgraded to fibre optic, and is therefore up to current 'state of the art' performance. Most of us have wire connections to the exchange, which will slow down the signal, but if you are experiencing low speeds (less than 2Mb) it must be down to,

• your equipment,
• the telephone line in your house,
• the connection from your house to the exchange (speed drops as you get further away from the exchange),
• your service provider.

So what can you do about it? Firstly check that your equipment is working properly - if you are not sure about doing that, get in an expert. Check that your equipment (modem) is connected to the first telephone socket in the house, ie. the one that the incoming telephone wire is connected to, and that you have a filter (thats the little white box that plugs into the telephone socket) on EVERY telephone socket in the house that has a phone plugged into it.
Apart from these things, you can't do much apart from complaining!

There are several ways to complain. In the first instance, try contacting your service provider to check if they can do anything about it. If that doesn't get you anywhere, contact Andrew Lansley (our MP), who is collecting information about speeds in the area and how it affects people. You can do this by email to lansleya@parliament.uk, or write to him at 152 St Neots Rd, Hardwick CB23 7GJ.

A third way is to contact the EEDA (the East of England Development Agency) via their website http://erebusonline.org.uk . Whichever route or routes you take, you MUST make sure that you have some real facts to present, and in the case of the EEDA a valid reason for wanting a better service ('I want faster Broadband' is not a valid reason!).

If you want to test your speed, you should close all programs on your computer, then start up your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc), make sure you only have one page open, then go to www.speedtest.net. When the page has loaded, click on 'Begin test'. This will then show you your 'upload' and 'download' speeds. It is the download speed that you need to quote. Run the test several times and check for a consistent reading, and try doing it at different times of the day. Then, armed with real data you can make your complaints.