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How To Speed Up Your Broadband DSL Throughput

You may be able to double, triple, or even quadruple your broadband DSL speed without paying additional fees to the carrier.

Twenty-eight million homes in the United States subscribe to broadband DSL. Most DSL subscribers should expect to receive about ninety percent of the speed offered under their DSL service plan. A substantial number of households, however, pay for much higher DSL speeds than they actually experience. Using an inexpensive pots-splitter at the location the telephone line enters the house, many people have doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled their broadband DSL speed without paying more in service fees.

Although the telephone company has many tools to troubleshoot problems with their lines and equipment, they cannot help you much with the phone wiring in your home. A weak DSL signal inside your home can be caused by long wire lengths, poor connections, multiple wires, multiple connectors, improper grounding and other variables. Your DSL speed will be better if you eliminate these issues. DSL modems are good at working around noise on the line, but do so at the expense of top download speed and latency (delay). DSL technicians tell us that many line problems originate from bad inside wiring, so splitting the DSL signal from the telephone line as early as possible would certainly eliminate this problem.

To do that, you can install an inexpensive pots-splitter where the telephone line enters your home or garage at the box called the Network Interface Device (NID). By installing a pots-splitter at the NID, the DSL signal from the telephone company to your modem is as short and uncluttered as possible. No longer does the DSL signal wind through your home over internal phone wiring — even though most telephone company installation instructions tell you to do that. Why do they recommend that? Because installing pots-splitters yourself inside the home saves the telephone company the expense of making a trip to do the installation right. Those “pigtail” pots-splitters you self-install don’t offer the optimum DSL signal path. The excess in-house line length, the phone jacks and the additional phone equipment in your home all contribute to noise and attenuation of the DSL signal — and therefore slower speeds.

Instead, to achieve the shortest, cleanest connection, you should buy a pots-splitter and put your DSL modem next to the pots-splitter at the NID. By installing the pots-splitter at your NID, you keep your home telephone wiring out of the DSL signal path, and consequently your line condition is now the responsibility of the telephone company. The telephone company can then easily use their central equipment to monitor and troubleshoot the condition of the DSL line to your home. They otherwise cannot do the best job troubleshooting the line if the DSL signal also runs through your house. With the DSL signal terminating at the NID, they have no excuse to deliver speeds less than the one offered under your service plan. If the speed is much less than promised, ask your telephone company to fix their line until it comes close to the DSL rate offered under your service plan.

Once you’ve installed your pots-splitter and modem next to the NID, you also need to install your Ethernet router there too. You might wonder how to use your computer when the Ethernet router is in the garage. There are a couple of solutions. You can use a wireless extender or use HomePlug devices. Although these add a little cost, your improved DSL speed should be worth it. If your wireless Ethernet connection is blocked by the walls, HomePlug devices offered by many vendors provide a fast, reliable Ethernet connection to any room in your home.