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.

The County Council has launched its superfast broadband project county-wide, and the outcome of planned improvements to connections particularly in rural areas depends on feedback from users and potential users.
How to take part:
The Connecting Cambridgeshire website has gone live. Now we need as many people as possible to click on the link on the home page to show their demand for better broadband.
You can register in minutes with just a postcode and landline phone number to show where you want better broadband - at home and at work.
The more people that register that they want superfast broadband the more chance of it being delivered.
Why not do your bit now by filling in this simple broadband demand form?

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.