Why is my download speed so slow

Hi there my name is Adam from ASENT Data Cabling and in this blog post I'm going to talk to you about a common question: why is my download speed so slow? Well, there are a few things that we need to talk about. Firstly, and it's the most important one really, is distance. Specifically the distance from your local exchange. Your exchange is where the DSLAM is housed, and that is your access points to the internet service provider, and therefore the rest of the world. And what happens is your ADSL signal has to travel from the exchange through the copper wires all the way to your house. Now the further you are the more loss there is in the line. They call this attenuation. The closer you are the less attenuation and the stronger the signal. So if you live really close to an exchange, I’m talking within a couple of hundred metres you can expect speeds of somewhere between 15 and 20 megabits. If your living a fair distance away like for example I do (I live about 3 and a half to 4Kms from the exchange) you can get around 8 megabits. And the further out you go the worse it gets. The distance limit is generally around 5 to 6 kilometres from the exchange. Rural areas are a little bit different; they use a different cable which does alter things slightly. The next things were going to talk about are related: Foreign Battery, which is extra voltage on the line, and Resistance to Earth. This is where the signal has to the opportunity to seep out of the cable and go to ground. This will seriously affect your speed. If this happens you will notice a speed decline and it can be quite dramatic. However, the funny thing about this is that it progresses quite slowly so you don’t notice it straight away. It’s only after say a month or two that you suddenly notice that your speed is quite slow when in actual fact it’s been slowly declining over time. To test this ring your ISP and get them to run some tests. They can check those two things and if they find it they will then send out a technician to repair the line. The next thing I'm going to talk about is high resistance open circuits. It's a fancy name that basically it means is a cable is partially broken, so sometimes its connecting and sometimes it’s not. This can also make your telephone quite noisy; you get a staticy kind of noise when you use your telephone. When you run a test through a site like speedtest.net your internet service speed should be relatively flat, a constant speed all the way through. Now when you have a high resistance open circuit you start to get fluctuations on that and your speed test will start going up and down, up and down, that’s not good because that means you’re going between full speed and quite slow speed. So again speak to your ISP, ask them to run some tests, tell them you've got a noisy line and get a technician out to check it out. Now the last thing that can affect your internet: the settings from your internet service provider. Most ISP (internet service providers) have a webpage where you can change your profile. You can have aggressive profiles, you can have quite conservative profiles. The reason for having different profiles is because the more aggressive that you are the less stable your connection will be. So if you start getting internet drop outs the ISP will often 'throttle back' your internet speed to see if they can achieve stability. So check the settings in your internet service provider’s page. That may also be slowing your internet connection down. So there you have it: four primary reasons why your internet speed may be slower than it should and some tips on how to fix them. If you like this post please share with your friends on the various social media sites. And if you have any other questions please feel free to put them in the comments below and we'll answer them as soon as we possibly can. Thanks for your time.