As of tonight I have had my internet connection upgraded to ADSL Max - up to 8 Mb/s. I have to wait about 10 days now for the exchange to decide what speed it wants to give me, hopefully it will be nearer to 4 but I doubt it will be that great as my phone line has always been a bit crap (it swings through the trees ffs BT!)

Whilst searching around for some ways to get the best out of this upgrade, I came across this interesting article. In short, it says to get the best speeds (I think this applies to any adsl connection) you need to disconnect the orange and white coloured wire in your main phone plug socket. The article says it is the ‘ring wire’, left over from the days when it had to power the bell in the phone to make it ring. Nowadays it just serves to collect interference from any nearby power cables or electrical devices, passing the noise onto the phone line. This makes sense to me, so I’m going to try disconnecting it tomorrow, hopefully to see better sync speeds. Maybe its a load of bull and will make my phone completely discombobulate, we shall have to see.

[edit] Ok, I’ve disconnected both orange cables in the main socket. Theres one orange with a thin white band, and one thats half and half of each. I have no idea what they are for, but they were obviosly just creating a lot of noise on the line. The evidence that proved it was opening the BT box on the wall in the kitchen, and seeing that the only wires from the cable that went anywhere were the blue ones, the others were just twisted together and disgarded. So now the only two wires connected to the phone socket in our house are the blue and white ones. The signal to noise ratio (SNR) reported by my router is slightly lower than before, but its probably not helped today by the heavy rain so I expect it will improve tomorrow. [edit] Next day its noticeably better, but I don’t think i’m ever going to get the full 8 Mb/s due to the distance from the exchange (about 2.5 km) and the poor line quality.