Broadband >> What You Need

BROADBAND - WHAT'S NEEDED

What's needed for ADSL:

• A BT Standard Analogue Telephone Line
• An ADSL enabled BT local telephone exchange
• To be within a 'reasonable distance' of the local BT exchange
• Premises - your home or office
• An ADSL Modem or Router

To buy ADSL you have to have a standard BT line and wall socket (the small white BT wall box) - most businesses and homes have these. The line has to be direct (not passing through a PABX or office switchboard) and free of various other special BT services (Red Care, Star Services, Call Minder, Multiple Lines and Call Waiting). You can order new line if you wish. At present the same line cannot be used for any ISDN or ISDN Highway service, but you can convert an ISDN enabled line to an ADSL enabled line by removing the ISDN service, this conversion is now free of charge!

Currently about 95% of the country can get ADSL. Because of the drop in signal strength the further away from the exchange you are, you currently need to be within 5.5km of the local exchange. The way that RADSL works, the further you are away from the exchange the lower your upload speed will be. The speed is negotiated automatically by the modem and exchange.

BT line - The service is set up at the main or first socket. You can have a few extensions from there, but these may need to be rewired when the ADSL service is installed. (If there are too many some will have to be disabled.) A standard power supply so that the new ADSL terminating equipment can be powered (not required for CBS USB Modem) (If you loose power your service will drop).

The connection to your computer equipment is either by an RJ45 standard LAN (Local Area Network), or an active USB port of a PC (note that some older PCs have USB ports but they are not active).

Also note that these need to be reasonably close together. The power supply should be within 3ft of the phone socket and the connecting LAN socket or USB port should be within 3ft. If they aren't the service will not be installed. For single machines, either an External USB Modem (which is the most common option) or an Internal PCI Modem will both give the same speeds.

For a number of machines or a network, we would recommend an Ethernet Router.