Do you suffer from poor Broadband Internet performance?

Just a couple of days ago we were reporting how the future of Broadband lay in the sewer in terms of performance and today we're discussing the age-old problem of pathetically slow and unreliable Broadband connections. What goes around, comes around as they say.

We have had an 8mbps BT Business Broadband account since it came out, relying on a 2mbps connection before that and a 512Kbps connection before that again. However, there was never cause for complaint until we got the latest and fastest connection and, since then, we've suffered really poor performance (sometimes down in the slow hundreds of kilo-bits-per-second) and dropped connections on a regular basis.

I go through the usual ritual of ringing BT and starting at the bottom with the lowest common denominator support staff, work my way up to the highest level over a few weeks of constant ringing, get an engineer to come out, only for him to test the line and find that it's absolutely fine. I then get bored, suffer the poor performance and start all over again a few months later.

Well it appears that there may be an answer to this terrible service that we all have to put up with. It's been 18 months since Davey Winder upgraded to an 8Mbps ADSL Max Broadband connection. He's suffered all the usual poor performance, drop-outs, and the like - but it seems he's hit on the solution and published it in the February edition of PC Pro. Apparently the majority of routers we can buy use Texas Instruments' (TI's) AR7 chipset inside them - so much so that it's hard to find one that doesn't, especially since manufacturers rarely tell the consumer which chipset they use. However, when BT sends out an engineer they are equipped with a non-AR7 router, declare the line fine and charge the customer for the privaledge of doing absolutely nothing at all.

There appears to be some form of incompatibility issue between AR-7 equipped routers and ADSL Max, claims Davey, but neither TI nor BT are breaking their silence on the issue. Grossly unfair we think and, in the meantime, we have to battle with fluctuating speeds, dropouts and disconnections.

Ah well, roll on 16mbps Broadband - that should be a riot. I think I'll go back to 56kbps dial-up, it should prove to be quite a bit quicker.