One Easy Tip To Make ADSL That Extra Bit Faster

Just recently I have read an article claiming that any one can increase their ADSL internet connection speed for about £10. And this involves no wiring at all which got me curious, so I tried it out

 What's Involved

Making your ADSL internet speed faster is very straight forward (unless you don't have the correct equipment, but even that is not too bad) and can, so the article claims, increase it by a third all for about £10. I was gobbed smacked to the point I had to try it, before I moved my internet connection was using cable, which was very fast, but the area I live in now only supports ADSL, so any increase in speed helps.

What did I do?

The ADSL connection is by Virgin Media but uses a BT phone line. I had the very old style (and I mean old) Master Socket box (NTE5). I had to buy a new one for about £5 to make this to work. It's very easy to install too, just two wires are needed to connect to the new box and the unit comes with a small booklet of instructions for the wires. The two wires may be the old type of wiring so if you have orange, white, green, black the only two needed are the orange and white wires. One (it does not matter which way) goes to A and the other goes to B on the back of the NTE5 back plate, there are two screws with A & B marked next to them.

To make the ADSL faster you will need to purchase another face plate for about £10. This other face plate that's needed is an Open Reach type where two sockets are at the front, one for the phone line and the other for the internet. It works due to it's built in advanced filter. The internet socket is straight through but the phone socket is filtered. Again it's very easy to install once the Master socket is in place, just unscrew and replace the face plate, that's it. I bought mine from Sol Wise, but other companies will sell them.

Testing Before & After

Before you swap over the face plate do an internet speed test and to do so visit Speedtest.net. The results will show how fast your download and upload speed is, also how high your ping is (the lower the better).

Here's the first test I did before the changes:



And the after results a few days later:

As you can see the download & upload have gone up with the ping going down. It's not a great lot but overall the internet connection does seem faster. Loading videos is more instant rather than waiting so that's an improvement. I can see a difference in speed and even though it's not quite a third faster I still recommend it, just for neatness and the fact it has two sockets.