It’s no coincidence we’re giving away Cat 6 data cable twice a day at our ARC stand if you can answer one of the “101 NBN Questions You’re Customers Could Ask You” (just listen out for our horn during the day & come running).
Cat 6 is all about delivering fast, reliable, always on broadband speed, the main things the public and nbn customers constantly say they both want and have a lot of complaints about.
If you’re a bit hazy on the whole speed at home thing, then we’ve got some quick tips for you right here, but we’re happy to give you a lot more help when we meet you at ARC.
What’s to blame for lack of speed?
There are a few elements that can impact on speed including the home network and equipment, the type of access you have, or the RSP Network.
Network & Equipment
A Wired network will give you the most reliable network connection between a device and the service providers Gateway. You can easily check the connection speed as it will be shown under the network options.
WiFi will give you very flexible connectivity but it will be affected by the number of users and the level of interference. So, the more WiFi devices on the WiFi network the slower the link between the device connected via WiFi and the service provider gateway.
Other connectivity technologies could be HomePlug where the electrical cable is used to provide the connectivity.
To determine the speed, you may need to drill down or access different devices. For example, if you want to see the link speed go to “Settings” or control panel depending on your version of windows. Click on “Network & Internet” and find and click on “Network and Sharing Centre”. There you will see if you are connected via “Ethernet” or “WiFi”.
Type of access
If the network provider is nbn™ then the access type is; FTTP, FTTN, FTTB, FTTC, HFC, Fixed Wireless, Satellite. If you have FTTN, FTTB, FTTC and HFC you can check the link speed available on nbn’s part of the network. You can usually do this by login into the Gateway and looking at the “Connection status” of the Gateway, you can access your gateway by go to Google and type in “default gateway” and can find instructions on how to find it’s IP address and then you just type that IP address into your web browser.
RSP network
So how can we check your RSP’s side of the network. Go to www.speedtest.net and run the test.
As you can see the speed available on nbn’s network element and the speed testing the RSP’s network show them to be close to each other, so if you allow for overheads, this indicates that the RSP’s network is not impacting on the speed. If on the other hand the speed test showed a much lower speed relative to the nbn’s network element then you could conclude the RSP was not keeping up its side of the bargain. Also do the speed test at different times of the day and record the results very time so you can show your RSP.
Come and visit us at stand L48 or Australian Registered Cablers
