Alan Stevens

Regular readers of IT Week will be all too aware of the problems I’ve had getting broadband. Or rather, not getting it, either through cables or wireless masts, due to the fact that I’ve always been too far from the exchange for ADSL, no matter how far its reach was extended. Until, that is, a couple of weeks ago, when BT announced it would scrap distance limits on its basic 512kbit/s service altogether.

This is a welcome but not totally unexpected move, as the telecoms provider was known to be running long-distance connectivity trials in Milton Keynes and Fort William.

According to the company, these trials proved that ADSL could be made to work reliably over much longer distances than the current 6km limit. Moreover, it claims, most of the reliability problems encountered during the trials were related not to the quality of the BT lines or their length, but to the state of extension wiring on customer premises.

Call me cynical if you like, but this raises several questions in my mind. Starting with why, if the underlying ADSL technology itself hasn’t really changed, the BT engineers weren’t able to make these «discoveries» much earlier, such as during last year’s long-distance trials, for instance, when the distance limit was increased by only a meagre 500m.

Also, in order to address the recently uncovered on-site wiring problems, BT plans to have its engineers fit a special faceplate on the master phone socket. The same faceplate that is included as a standard part of its professional, engineer-installed, ADSL service. The faceplate not only isolates the data signal from any extension cabling but, at the same time, makes for a much neater installation, with no need for a microfilter on every active telephone port.

By the way, the faceplate is also available from an independent source for those interested in such things, here.

But why, if it’s such an easy fix, wasn’t this faceplate suggested as a possible solution before? I, for one, would have immediately paid for it to be installed.

As welcome as BT’s announcement will be to people caught in the broadband wilderness, I wonder just how much it really has to do with the results of the Milton Keynes and Fort William trials.

In fact the cynic in me wonders whether it might have as much, if not more, to do with the earlier announcement of BT’s intention to port the whole of the UK phone network to IP by 2008. For that to happen the company needs to get ADSL and other digital services to every property in the country. Whereupon, all of a sudden, it is worth BT meeting the needs of people like me — something it previously deemed uneconomic.