A couple of months ago, we got approval from the Church Council to upgrade the internet connection that the Church uses to broadband. Up until then, the internet connection had only been dial-up, which tied up the phone line when collecting e-mail, and caused regular hiccups with sending e-mail.

My initial worry was whether the line itself would be able to take broadband, but the initial tests by BT proved positive, with the prospect of being able to get a 1 Meg connection. That was turned on on 22nd December, at which point Matt went up to do the relatively straightforward task of plugging in the ADSL router and hooking up the PC.

What he hadn’t counted on was the quality of the existing phone wiring.

The master socket, where the phone line comes in to the building is down in the kitchen, with the other extensions hard wired into the socket, however the office, which is almost directly above the kitchen is on the end of about 700 feet of phone extension that goes across to the other side of the building and comes back across and into the office through the loft. Matt couldn’t get a stable ADSL connection out of the connection in the office, but had more luck with connecting directly into the master socket. However the connection again started to drop out whenever he reconnected anything else.

As a result, after three days worth of fiddling, he’s finally given up and we’re going to call a BT engineer in to investigate. Hopefully we’ll also be able to get him to move the master socked up to the office too. It is also a good reminder that the quality of your broadband connection is only as good as your phone wiring. Whilst a human can put up with pretty poor quality phone calls through wiring such as the stuff in the Parish Centre, ADSL is really a lot more fussy.