Thread: Thumbs Up! for 02 Broadband!

Originally Posted by BoostDrinker

I'm a big fan of O2 Home Broadband and I've been with quite a few ISPs over the years.

I get the basic LLU package for £7.34 a month plus I got £65 cash back from Quidco.com when I joined. This works out at £23.08 for a year's broadband connection!

And people wonder why the ultra cheap broadband companies like Pipex and Tiscali keep going titsup.com...

Just think how many households are going to lose internet access if/when Talk Talk follows in Tiscali's footsteps and there is no-one left to step in...

Sorry to bump an old topic, but I wanted to add I've been massively impressed with O2.

I've just finished setting up O2 broadband (my first ever ADSL after having used cable for years and years, and moving to a non-virgin area) and the service has been great. I encountered an issue a day after activation - and at 7pm at night a nice helpful guy spent almost an hour diagnosing everything, and was even ringing the relevant BT folk to enquire about an issue noted against the line whilst I was on hold. A similar issue on Virgin would have taken weeks to resolve whilst being passed around.

And as a bonus, as part of the diagnosis they had me connecting through the BT test socket (behind the front plate on the master) where I noticed my speed tests went up from under 10Mbit to almost 17Mbit. A £7 i-plate later to filter out the bell wire (I didn't want to fiddle with wiring as this place is rented and nearly new) and I'm online at about 14-16Mbit with no Virgin style traffic throttling

Just as a matter of interest, the bell wire is completely un-used in virtually every circumstance, and you could have happily disconnected it. Appreciate what you say about fiddling in the premises, and indeed with the raft of phone cable in a modern property the un-balanced bell wire can have a serious impact, especially as very few sparks actually honour the segregation and perpendicular cable crossings that should be the case with telco.

None the less that is a decent gain for an i-plate!

Originally Posted by PeteK

Just as a matter of interest, the bell wire is completely un-used in virtually every circumstance, and you could have happily disconnected it. Appreciate what you say about fiddling in the premises, and indeed with the raft of phone cable in a modern property the un-balanced bell wire can have a serious impact, especially as very few sparks actually honour the segregation and perpendicular cable crossings that should be the case with telco.

None the less that is a decent gain for an i-plate!

That was my understanding, and other than a cordless phone, ADSL is all the line is used for so I did seriously consider just disconnecting it. However I decided to go for the non-intrusive option, partly just to see how well it works as I'd now happily recommend this to non-technically minded friends/family.

I must say considering the property is only a few years old I was surprised the internal wiring had such an impact.

Originally Posted by Blackfoot

I must say considering the property is only a few years old I was surprised the internal wiring had such an impact.

Unfortunately the bell wire is not part of a balanced pair. All the "data" comes in over a balanced pair on pins 2/5 but the ringing signal (which is what goes down the bell wire) is generated at the master socket. This is a single wire (pin 3) which merely takes the ringing voltage to the other sockets, and as it is un-twisted eminates a shed load of RF pickup from anything within 5 miles of it, especially few hundred khz radio (long wave) which is roughly in the same frequency range as the ADSL signal.

The i-plate sticks a bit more RF filtering on the ring wire, plus a little high frequency cut off on the 2/5 pairs too.

Virtually all phones made in the last half a million years have their own bell capacitor internally, and therefore only need 2/5 and pin 3 has become more or less defunct. Even if you do disconnect it and a phone doesnt ring, you only need to plug the phone into a microfilter (which it would need in any case) and a ring capacitor is re-introduced.