The Beau’s Bits: Boost your broadband for less than £10
Today we are very lucky to have The Beau doing a guest post for us, and he’s a quite the tech guru so here’s a bit of money-saving lifehacking to get your downloads running faster without shelling out for an upgrade with your service provider. Take it away, Beau!
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“There’s one area of technology that seems to cause a lot of gripes with consumers – broadband speed. Everywhere we look we see companies offering 20MB broadband and as more and more of our phones, PC’s, TV’s, Blu-Ray players, X-Box’s and Playstations demand fast connections prices have come down, but has the service improved to cope with demand?
I think it’s fair to say that for those of us who get our broadband via our home phone line there’s a vast majority who are not getting anywhere near the advertised speed we signed up for. Suppliers get away with this by advertising the fact that you will get ‘up to’ a certain speed for your money, depending on how far away from your local telephone exchange you are and how good your wiring is. Fair enough, we don’t all live next door to the exchange but when we all pay the same it is a tad annoying that the service provided can be so variable.
Here’s a little thing I’ve discovered that can, for some of us anyway, provide a way of increasing your broadband speed by up to 4MB for under a tenner.
It’s called the i-Plate (no, it has nothing to do with Apple!) and it basically replaces the faceplate on your existing BT socket. Many older BT sockets have a wire in them called the bell wire which was used to make old analogue telephones ring. However, it’s pretty much useless in modern households where the vast majority of us have digital handsets, but it can in many cases, cause interference and affect the speed of your broadband.
I’m no telephonics expert so I won’t attempt to explain any further but if you check out the details on this site, there’s a very good explanation of how it works and it shows you how to check if your BT socket could benefit from it.
I installed one and my Sky Broadband speed improved by about 1.5MB straight away. Not bad at all.
You can buy it from the Broadbandbuyer website or direct from BT themselves.
Or search on eBay and you may find it even cheaper.
For less than £10 I’d say it’s definitely worth it.”
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Thinking about giving this one a try? Or do you have any tech tips of your own that can save a packet?
