An interesting letter

We had an interesting letter from the Ayuntamiento, signed by the Mayor last week. I expect everyone on the estate received the same one.

As the Town Hall points out, Telefónica installed a cable in 2006 from the town up to our estate which meant that we could at last have fixed telephone lines and perhaps more important, an ADSL connection to the Internet.

In the early days of ADSL, you had to be almost next door to the exchange to get even a 1Mb connection. Then they introduced RADSL or rate adaptive ADSL where upstream speed was sacrificed for downstream speed to create greater tolerance to line noise and signal loss. The broadband modem that you use for this automatically adjusts the speed of your connection to adjust for the quality of the line.

What this meant was that houses further away could still enjoy broadband Internet albeit with a reduced upstream speed. Please note that even with normal ADSL, upstream speeds are always significantly lower than downstream speeds - that is the A for Asymmetrical part of the name.

The theoretical maximum distance that ADSL will work over is a little less than 5.5kms however, most would consider a distance of 3km to be the true maximum. This distance is not as the crow flies though but as the cables are routed.

In their letter, the Ayuntamiento point out that many houses on Villas Andrea are in fact over 3kms away from the nearest exchange which I believe is on Calle Apatel and so our ADSL speeds are restricted.

Originally, Telefónica quoted a maximum of 3Mbs for the connections they supplied increasing that to 6Mbs a year or so later. At the same time, they offered an increase to 10Mbs if you paid an additional 4 Euros per month.

Those of us who took advantage of this offer of 10Mbs were supplied with a new Comtrend router that would work with ADSL 2+. Latterly, Telefónica have dropped that extra charge and so everyone should in theory be able to enjoy a 10 Mb connection but only if they have an ADSL 2+ modem of course - 10Mbs is the maximum that Telefónica currently offer. They say that you only need to disconnect your modem and reconnect it to upgrade your speed.

Theory is one thing and practice is something else. So the question is, “what speed can we actually achieve?”. When my modem was first installed it showed 10Mbs but there were regular drop outs. Within a day it had settled down to about 8.4Mbs downstream and 712Kbs upstream. Telefónica say that the loss of 1.6 Mb on the downstream speed is within normal tolerances taking into account computer overheads and line quality and 712kb upstream is close to the 800Kbs quoted.

The letter from the town hall goes on to suggest that we need to petition Telefónica if we are to see any improvement on the quality of our ADSL connections. Whether the town hall are prepared to do this on our behalf is not clear but from past experience individual complaints will achieve nothing. It would take a joint effort on all our parts to make any impression on Telefónica and even then we might have to wait some time for a result. Let’s face it, if their service is as slow as their website, then we will wait forever!