Will I get 8 Mbps on ADSL Max?

Not everyone will get 8 Mbps. Infact, BT Wholesale cap everyone at 7.15 Mbps to start with regardless of your distance from the exchange or ISP.

If you wish to get an estimate of what speed you will be able to achieve on your line, please click HERE and enter your telephone number. Bear in mind this is an estimate and may be more or less than you achieve in reality

You are looking for the line similar to this "Our test also indicates that your line should be able to support a potential ADSL Max broadband line rate of 6Mbps up to 8Mbps." in the results.

If your house/premises is quite a distance from the exchange, your line will connect at the maximum speed it can reliably achieve.

The further away you get, the lower the speed will be. This is just a factor of how ADSL works and not because the ISP is slow or capping your speeds.

All ADSL connections rely on two main factors that are unique to your phone line. These are known as SNR margin and Attenuation.

The SNR margin is how much signal you are receiving as opposed to noise on the line, and Attenuation is how much loss of signal you have on the line. The SNR margin will often fluctuate at different times of the day, so it is difficult to monitor, whereas Attenuation is fairly static, and depends on the actual length and quality of your phone line between your premises and the BT exchange.

For SNR margin, higher is better (higher signal to noise), but for Attenuation, lower is better (meaning not much loss of signal on the line).

The SNR margin will reduce as you connect at higher speeds. For a reliable service, the SNR margin has to be above 6, and ideally above 10.

For example, if you have an SNR margin of 10, and you are on a 2 Mbps ADSL service, you would not gain much better speeds from ADSL Max, as if you were to connect any faster, the SNR margin may drop to below 6, causing disconnections and download speed problems. But, if you have an SNR of 40 on a 2 Mbps ADSL service, you should receive the full 8 Mbps on ADSL Max, which will cause the SNR to drop to about 8-10, just enough to operate reliably.

One thing worth noting is that for the ADSL Max service, there will not be a limit on whether you can sign up to it or not. You will simply be provided with the service, and the equipment at the exchange will automatically determine what speed your line is capable of providing each time you connect, based on your SNR margin. This is usually a good thing, as while you may connect at a slower than expected speed, it will help stop your connection from disconnecting due to a low SNR margin.

We are sure most people would rather have a stable, always on connection, than a slightly faster, intermittent one.

 

 

For details of the options available for  Broadband click here