Festive Faults

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We’re at the time of the year where historically we see more faults raised about dropping connections and poor speeds. It’s a bit of an urban myth in the broadband community, but it is actually very true that your Christmas Tree lights can have a big impact on the quality of your broadband connection. The reason for this is because these lights will create a level of interference which can cause the quality of the signal on your broadband connection to deteriorate or even drop. There are plenty of things that you can do to try and minimise the problems caused by additional festive interference: -Try and position your Christmas tree as far away as possible from your broadband modem/router. -Ensure that your modem/router is plugged directly into your BT master socket - the use of extension cables will increase interference on your line. -Make sure that you have microfilters on all active telephone sockets in your house (not just the one that your modem/router is connected to!) If you follow all these steps then you should significantly reduce the possibility of experiencing some festive broadband problems. If you do experience slower speeds or disconnections over the Christmas period, and you have followed all the steps above, then there are a couple of other things that you can try before raising a fault: - Try using a different microfilter - Unplug all telephony devices from your telephone sockets (and turn off your Christmas Tree lights!) - Where possible, try using a different broadband modem or router (maybe you can borrow one from a friend or work?) These are all ways of ensuring that your hardware and internal wiring are working fine and that the interference being caused is unlikely to be down to something in your house. BT are obliged to provide a broadband service to your master socket so we will always have to ask our customers to check everything between the master socket and their computer. When you have done these checks, you can then raise a fault with us using our Faults checker over at http://faults.plus.net This will then ask you a series of structured questions and offers similar advice on resolving your fault. Once you've finished raising this, we'll then be able to run some checks on your telephone line and then raise it with BT where required. But I don't want to put too much of a dampener on the holiday season! From all of us here at PlusNet, we hope you have a very merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!