Broadband!! Grhhh. How to improve and have password control

[Wheelycote]

Wheelyteenagers are driving me spare.

As I may have mentioned once or twice on other threads....I've moved house. The broadband is rubbish. By has been out twice and the signal is as good as it's going to get for the area...apparently.

I've heard of Boosters, broadband channels. Can anyone in the know or with experience give me any tips or suggestions??

And can I change broadband password....if so how??hatching a plan to get wherlyteenagers to help decorate and help around the house

*BT meant to say 😀 not By

Will be bumping out of desperation, every time one of my two..asks or moans about the Internet.

That was wheelyyoungest wants me to buy a BT smart hub off eBay

It's more expensive than regular BB but what about something like this?

Wanda are they an internet provider? Are you with them?

Just did a postcode check, they don't cover my area st moment

We had rubbish internet at our last house. We moved! Sorry not helpful but I think the limiting factor is what is coming into the house and you can't do anything about it till BT upgrade the area around you. DH was thinking about getting internet over a satellite but we moved house instead.

Ours was really bad at best it was something like 0.8 mb at worst 0.1. If someone watched you tube the whole house ground to a halt.

Ruhr I may be tempted to move house if they keep pestering me.

They've tested it around the house apparently and it changes depending on what room your in. You'd think we live in a thick stone built big house. Its actually a 3 bed semi detached lol

Our house has concrete floors upstairs, and the router is in the corner of the lounge downstairs, so once you go upstairs there is zero internet. We've had good results though using a Netgear booster on the upstairs landing. We often find it gives a stronger signal than our service provider's bloody router!

If it is a problem of stone walls then we use a set of Devolo plug in wifi units but that only transmits your existing broadband around your house.
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Sky q solved our problems with not getting Wi-Fi in all our rooms but not sure ou'd that helps with broadband speed

What does bt say is the best signal for the area? Think our best possible was 1.5 mb which is still rubbish. Now we have 100mb optical fibre and you really notice the difference.

Our area even had a petion in the local coop for us all to sign to get the area upgraded.

They provide internet over air. In our rural area we also had petitions and local MP involved. This company got the contract for high speed internet instead of getting BT to update the wires much to local disgust. It's true they offer super fast speed - but at a price. Also we still need a landline as no mobile signal.

Whichever provider you use the same wires come into the house so for example BT / sky will be roughly the same speed. We get about 8mbps which is just about enough though upload is poor.
Those plug in things are ok but ethernet is better. My gamer teen uses ethernet miles of cable strung through the house. This gives a more reliable signal and minimises lag. It won't boost the speed though.

Wanda it looks like we're about 8mb too.

We have a chimney in the centre of the house and I think that affects the signal getting through.

May consider the ethernet for the gaming. Might mean pulling carpets up though. Saying that I could run them behind the skirting boards - the house has none at moment.

Ruhr love that a petition was signed

It's unclear how much of your problem is the wire coming into your house, and how much is the Wifi signal inside the house.

Presumably your router or Master socket has a LAN socket? You can poke a wire into that and into your desktop, cutting out the wifi loss. See if that does much good. If it does, it's possible, if you can be bothered, to wire up the rooms in the same way that, in the old days, telephone extensions used to be wired.

This is something I have not done for years so I don't recall the cable you want. They are mostly sold in cable 2m/5m/10m/15m lengths with a plug at each end, but can be made to order at modest cost. I'm on a wire at the moment and it is much faster than wifi.

The sockets will look like the orange ones in this pic

IIRC the plugs are called RJ45

Even Tesco sell them

If you don't have enough sockets, you can get a sort of multiway adaptor for a few pounds.

I'm sure there are dozens of office IT techies who can explain it better.

Hello PigletJ thanks....again you helped me out with recommendation for my bathroom

Our internet is the same, we get around the same speed as you. 2 years on and we are kind of used to it

Who are you with? We complained to EE and because they are not providing us with the minimum speed they state we get it for free, they also added loads more data to our phones to compensate.
Definitely worth pushing for!

Idsasloth I'll try that thanks

not a matter of speed, but we had shocking reliability issues with Sky. Changed provider and lo and behold, it works. Partly a replacement for a probably-faulty router and partly plugging into a different board in the exchange.

Have you looked into changing provider?

also have a look to see what speed neighbours get. With a heavy teenage load, fibre may be the way to go IF it is available.

Are you using a BT router i.e. "hub"? They are notoriously rubbish . If Speedtest shows you have a decent connection, I'd look into replacing the BT router with something better. I have BT Infinity and although my connection speed is good, my actual wifi signal inside my flat from my shite BT HomeHub was dreadful. I tried boosters etc and they made something of an improvement but nothing spectacular. In the end I replaced the BT HomeHub with a Netgear Nighthawk. Took me only a few mins to set up and blew my rubbish BT router out of the water. Now I get download speeds of approx 80mb and am very happy indeed!

As Piglet says test the speed with a wired connection to the router first. If you get 8mpbs wired then your internet isn't great but it'll do. The issue with the speed to your house is determined by the distance of your house to the exchange.

If you are far from the exchange then nothing can be done to improve ADSL speed. It's just a fact of signal decay on a copper wire.

If your area is served by Fibre then your best bet is to switch to a fibre plan; however fibre is still affected by distance from the exchange unless you go with hyperoptic or virgin media who both do fibre to the premise.

If the signal to your router is good and it's then a degraded wifi signal around your house there are a number of options.

A) put in a switch and then run cat6 Ethernet cables around the house (as piglet said they're with RJ45 connectors). The wires can be purchased on a roll but then they don't have any plugs. A crimper doesn't cost a lot but is fiddly to use. You can purchase them in fixed lengths with the plugs already on.

B) signal booster/signal repeater. You install these at strategic locations around your house and they take the wifi signal and repeat it. They can be connected to the original router either by a cable or wifi signal. Rough cost of ~150 for the whole house to be well covered.

C) power line adaptors if you have the sockets available near your router. These funky devices turn your electrical circuits into data cables and can transmit reliably at about 300mbps. They're sold in pairs and require their own socket each. They used to have to be on the same ring main, but I don't believe they do anymore.

D) Finally, if it is a REALLY significant problem you can get a fixed line installed but the cost is significant- around £200/month. This will get you good service- about 40-50mbps but the cost is very very high.

Test your speed at the router (plug your laptop in or do the Speedtest with the laptop right next to the router) and tell us what download and upload you get.

Also need to know how many people are using it and what for, don't forget to include TVs if you use Netflix or amazon movies or BBC iPlayer etc. Also how old is your house and when was it last rewired?

Sorry the second part of your OP: if you want to have control you will probably need to buy a third party router. Most of the ones provided by various ISPs don't generally have many features.

A separate router will have an admin password that you should change from the standard 0000 or password or admin when you get it. At that time you should make a note of the MAC address of your laptop/phone/TV etc. Then if you want to disconnect someone from the internet you can log on to the router and the better routers will have an option to disconnect certain connected MAC addresses. So it depends how badly you want to control it really...

Cheers Hidden and Hundred!!!!!!!!!!