A bit of a long story, but I have got 2 phone lines at home:

Line 1 is the original one and has only got phones connected to it. I used to have broadband on it, but a couple of years ago my company paid for a separate phone line to be installed with business broadband as I need to be able to work from home.

Line 2 has an old handset connected to it and the broadband router, which I use for both business and home internet access.

When the teenagers are at hoime and watching iPlayer or something, the speed goes right down. I did the speed tests and it is getting about 1Mbps actual download speed, which is crap for nowadays, especially when BT is touting superfast broadband up to 20MB...

I went on BT's and several other ISPs' linetester sites and put in the phone numbers and postcode. All of them said that the max possible speed on Line 1 is 3.0Mbps, and the max on Line 2 is 1.0Mbps.

This seems totally illogical to me, when the house is the same distance from the exchange for both lines. After phoning several different BT "help" lines and getting not very far (e.g. "this is the residential office, you will have to phone the business office" and useless menus (e.g. "select 3 for xxx" then when you select 3, it says "the number you have dialled is unavailable, please check and dial again". So I selected the Sales option - guaranteed to get an answer! The bloke was quite helpful in that he checked the maximum potential speed of both lines, confirmed that Line 1=3.0 and Line 2=1.0, and agreed it was strange. He put me on hold and spoke to "an expert" who apparently said "yes, they are different" and when asked why said "they just are".

They offered to switch the broadband onto Line 1, but I am not sure if I should do that because Line 2 and the broadband are in the name of and paid for by my employer.

Anyway, that is by the by... does anyone know:

a) why there should be such a discrepancy between the two lines?

b) who at BT I can contact/complain to to get the line changed (can it be routed onto a different physical line to the junction box and on to the exchange, for example?)

Just to complicate things slightly, I was told that my local exchange should be being upgraded in February, which should increase the speed overall, but I suspect that Line 2 will still be slower.

Any ideas please?

TIA

Simon

I heard a while back that if you had any optical cable between you and your exchange, it could massively affect your speed or chances of getting BB - dunno how true it was.

Various things can cause this line 2 may have some alloy cable and Line 1 may be copper, both can take diffrent routes and have a diffrent number of joints along the way. Fibre optic to the cabinet has just been started by BT but it will take some years to do and I don't expect everywhere will get it without some goverment money digital Britian.

I have a similar problen here on 2 diffrent lines so understand your frustration.

Dave

The following might be your answer.
If you're using an "up to 8Mbps" ADSL connection (or slower) in the UK, the chances are that you are in fact using the BT Wholesale IPStream product. IPStream has been with us in one form or another since the ADSL roll-out began in 1999. It's a pretty simple product for the retail ISPs to work with; they just buy the tail circuits (i.e. your actual ADSL connection to the exchange) and "Central Pipes" from BT Wholesale - that's it. Central Pipes carry all of the ISP's users' traffic between the BT network and the ISP network. The downside to this simplicity is the lack of flexibility (i.e. fixed contention ratios, fixed bandwidth charges, no QoS), which in turn leads to retail ISPs offering pretty much identical products (with the exception of traffic caps).

DataStream has run alongside IPStream since launch and offers far more flexibility. An ISP using DataStream will still buy the tail circuits (the raw ADSL connections), but instead of taking a Central Pipe they will rent ports on the DSLAM (where your ADSL connection terminates in the exchange) and buy a VP (Virtual Path) at a certain capacity. This VP carries the data back to a POP (Point of Presence) of their choosing, so they can handle the backhaul to their network. Essentially, this is just the ISPs taking on the management of the backhaul, as opposed to BT handling it. The theory is that ISPs with their own networks could utilise these and realise significant cost savings.

However, DataStream has received an appalling reputation primarily due to certain ISPs' use of it. Whilst BT are quite good at managing capacity at the exchange, some ISPs have historically been shown to manage their VP capacity very poorly. This results in overcrowding of VPs, and ultimately very slow connections for end users. That said, DataStream can be very effective for specific purposes. For example, Cable & Wireless sell a 1:1 contended wholesale product on DataStream (each user has their own VP); a service like this is unobtainable on IPStream.
Cheers,
Bob

I also seem to remember something about teh different lines BT put in as a second line - one type I think used the unused pairs in the copper, and broadband on these lines is sh1t3 - if yours is a full second line, then it may just be that it connects to a different bit of kit in the exchange....

Cheers


Vince