How to speed up your broadband

Every ISP in the UK promises its clients fast and reliable access to the internet. In spite of this, many of us are however putting up with connections without enough bandwidth to power iPlayer, and with so much lag that online gaming is impossible.

Other web users tolerate draconian deals where downloads are monitored and restricted to particular times of day. If you're angry about your sluggish broadband speed, you don't have to take it any more.

How you can get the best from your connection

We know how you can get the best from your connection. We want to give you targeted advice specific to your needs, whether you're an online TV viewer, gamer, downloader, mobile broadband user or on a budget. Nevertheless there are some tweaks that everyone can benefit from.

If your broadband speeds are slow, it could be down to a host of issues. Some could be to do with problems at your telephone exchange. These can be fixed by BT through your ISP. Other issues could be related to problems on your side of the line, so it's best to get those sorted out earlier calling your ISP to complain.

While you're looking at your phone sockets, make sure that any extension sockets have ADSL filters fitted too. Every extension in your building needs a filter attached, whether you use it for broadband or not. That's why routers are often supplied with several.

If your download speeds haven't improved afterwards a few days, it's time to get friendly with your neighbours. Do they have problems with slow broadband speeds too? It could be that they're suffering alongside you. If that's the case, get online and find out what the optimum line speed is for your area.

The superb broadband resource Sam Knows has an online broadband checker that will tell you what the best line speed for your area should be. To find it, go to www.samknows.com/broadband/broadband_checker. Armed with this, you're ready to get into some more serious tweaks depending on your specific needs.

When watching streaming media, you have a right to expect stutter-free film and TV. With current broadband speeds, you should even be able to watch at resolutions of 720p or even 1080p.

Whether you'll get this depends on three factors. Your hardware is one of them - and we'll come back to that in a moment. The actual speed of your broadband is a crucial factor too. Less obvious is the overall stability of your connection, which can contribute as much to the perception of speed as your actual bandwidth. Dropped packets result in jerky performance and buffering loops that pause playback.

Great deal since broadband

ADSL has advanced a great deal since broadband was introduced, so a newer, better router that supports current protocols may help stabilise your connection.

When your router tries to sync with your broadband connection, it does so using multimode - a protocol that listens for a range of ADSL variants and at the time connects using the best method it can find. An older router may so then be connecting to broadband successfully, nevertheless using a legacy method. It as well means that as a first step, you could try getting a better connection using that age-old method: turning your router off and on again.

The connection isn't in its primary training period

As long as the connection isn't in its primary training period and you don't make a habit of it, this won't adversely affect the stability and speed of your broadband, nevertheless it may help you resync using a steadier, more stable protocol.

Over the years we've been trying and testing routers, it's surprising how often a different router can affect the speed and stability of a broadband connection. It's an odd fact of complex systems that some chipsets work better with certain exchanges than others.

Another way to reduce errors and dropped signals is to simplify your system. First, if streaming speeds are unsatisfactory, try a wired Ethernet connection to put it more exactly than Wi-Fi.

The network to reduce the competition for bandwidth

Remove other machines from the network to reduce the competition for bandwidth, and during you're at it, make sure that your media player - whether it's BBC iPlayer running in a browser, YouTube or an ISP-provided service like BT Vision - is the only thing sucking bandwidth from your net connection. That includes updaters, antivirus programs that call home, and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) tools like Skype.

You have a choice - a version that plays on iPlayer Desktop, a DRM-crippled download for Windows Media Player, or a lean version for portable devices. iPlayer desktop gives you the best quality, and is the choice to make if your computer's up to speed. If you're watching TV on an older machine, there's no shame in picking the version for portable playback to speed things up.

To eliminate client-side socket and filter problems from the broadband chain, begin by connecting your router directly to the master socket without a filter. Monitor your connection speed and stability.

Improvement this time

If you see an improvement this time, you can make the improvement permanent by fitting a BT I-Plate. This is an add-on that sits in between your existing telephone socket and the faceplate, routing your connection directly through the test socket.