ADSL Speed Increasing as neighbours migrate to FttP?

[DatabaseJase]

This question may well give everyone a good laugh on a Friday but here goes...

Our village has recently gone live with Gigaclear and were connected on May 1st taking us from 5-6Mbps to a 900Mbps connection. A number of our neighbours have also made the switch.

I'm keeping the old ADSL (Zen Internet) live as a backup for my business and recently noticed while looking at line stats that the connection is now 7.5mpbs and increasing which is speed I couldn't hope to achieve before.

The question I have is could it be that as more houses terminate their ADSL connection that the interference is reducing thereby increasing the speed of that connection? Is that a completely ridiculous thought?

 

[Mark.J]

I think it's more likely that the capacity supply has become less congested. Of course at the same time BT/OR have also been upgrading older exchanges to 21CN and that could have an impact. With ADSL the biggest interference issue stems from signal degradation over distance, not so much crosstalk.

 

[DatabaseJase]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the reply. I think our exchange (EMCLOPT) was upgraded some time ago now but I might be wrong.

I thought so although looking at the Zen portal the sync speed has increased. Now I wish I'd made a note of the SNR prior to May so I could compare. I'm just curious really so appreciate you explaining things.

Perhaps I'll give Zen a call as they're technical team are excellent and they may be able to see an improvement on the line to explain this sudden increase.

 

[Kits]

ADSL used to work on 6dB SNR as minimum but I have found that many now seem to work on 3dB SNR which has increased download speed.

 

[Captain_Cretin]

As Mark says, less people using ADSL means less congestion at the cabinet, so if the line wasnt running at maximum capable speed, you can see an improvement.

And as Kits says, less crosstalk also helps.

Improvements to the infrastructure leading to the cabinet can also help, but the ultimate limiting factor is your line to the cabinet.

In the years before I went FTTC, my ancient line got replaced, boosting speeds from 2 to 4.5Mbps.
Then the area had its infrastructure upgraded ready for FTTC, boosting speeds from 4.5 to 5.5Mbps down and a big boost to upload speeds from 300Kbps to 850Kbps.
Then I switched to a TPLink router which edged speeds up to 6.5Mbps and 1Mbps upload.

When FTTC was installed, my line synced at 110Mbps, limited by BT to 80Mbps.