Broadband - What Affects Speed?

Broadband can be a truly great thing to have in your home - it can be an information highway we can use to take us out of our homes and put us in the midst of billions of web pages full of information.

However, broadband isn’t such a fun time when it isn’t working at it’s top speeds - there are a number of things that stop broadband operating at the speeds it should do - read on to find out what affects your broadband speed and what you can do to speed it back up again;

Exchange

You get your broadband from the provider’s exchange - exchanges are situated within a certain number of miles from your home but the further away from the telephone exchange you are the slower your broadband will be.

This distance issue is apparent for ADSL Broadband that comes to your home through the telephone line and not to the more modern cable broadband that does away with the need for phone lines all together.

You obviously can’t change your distance from the telephone exchange but you should do some research before you get stuck into a contract - find out how far away you are from the closest telephone exchange and go online to perform an ADSL checker to see what speeds you could get. There’s no point paying for 20MBit/S broadband when you can only accept 4MBit/S.

Sharing

If you share a wireless broadband connection with a number of people in your home then you will undoubtedly feel a loss of speed - each time someone joins the network they will be getting a portion of the speed.

Contention Ratio

A way that your ISP will keep your speed as strong as possible is by using a contention ratio = this contention ratio caps the amount of people that can connect to the service meaning that you shouldn’t suffer too badly. Do your research because some caps are lower than others meaning faster speeds due to fewer people you’re sharing with.

Tasks

Performing a number of tasks can be a sure fire way of slowing down your broadband connection speed - if you are downloading using the full brunt of your broadband speed then you will notice that web pages will load much slower for example. This is just something you have to deal with if you want to get fast downloads…

Phone Line Quality
If you have a more modern telephone line that hasn’t taken a battering over the years then you’ll be receiving a better quality of broadband then you would through an old one. The same goes when dealing with routers.

If you want to go to the route of the problem then make sure you use good-quality wiring and routers to keep the stream strong from the exchange.

Speedy Broadband?

Do you want to speed up your broadband? Have you found any of our advice useful? Leave us a comment and let us know…