net speeds

Your question worries me--we are about to move to Poundbury, and want to have a decent internet connection.
What speed do you normally get?

speedchecks will be slow on poundbury as the nearest junction (exchange) for connections is the one located by the post office / military keep. This exchange is stupidly slow and is not really capable of deliviering high speed broadband. There will never be fast broadband in poundbury as long as this exchange is in use.

Would just like to add my frustrations regarding TV reception. I've lived on pundbury for less than one year and have since found out the following

Sky+ is impossible to have because houses are only wired with a single wire satellite connection into each home. (sky+ needs two cables). Also the satellite signal into my property in particular is rubbish and I found it impossible to get a steady strong enough signal to maintain a picture. I have since cancelled my contract with sky as had no other choice.

As for freeview, well that not too bad from the ariel point in my lounge. I now have BT vision which requires freeview and it seems pretty good. If the freeview signal drops out at least I can watch TV through BT vision. Its surprisingly good. BT broadband seems to work fine.

As for reception in other rooms in the house, well that's currently a problem. Have tried connecting TV's in all bedrooms and the strength of signal according to the portable digibox is just about 25%. When scanning for channels the box just does not pick up any. The house already has a multi 4 way signal booster fitted under the stairs. Disconnecting all cables from this box made no difference to the signal. This would suggest the booster is faulty or does not work. Problem is the builders never marked the cables in the cupboard so i have no idea which cable feeds which room. Also have 4 outlets from the booster but 5 ariel points. mmmm shame I dont have a wiring diagram...oh yes of course builders dont do this do they.

In short I'm appalled at the lack of vision when it comes to up to date technology for a development such as poundbury. Typical really. lets make it all look very pretty, tell people what they can and cant do then when they have moved in ignore all the issues.

Not making provision for Sky+ was an error by the development co, which I understand has been rectified on phase 1. My freeview and satellite reception are excellent, and can watch either reception as I have built in fresat in my TV. If you are having issues with the main signal strength then you should contact Telstar, as they are responsible for the service.
I have good reception in every room in the house, have you looped the signal from the master outlet into the system?

Following on from the answer to Christines issues I have since carried out the following:

I had already looped the signal from the lounge to realise that the signal was not strong enough to distribute around the rest of the house.

I have had no joy with telstar to rectify this issue. i also contacted the Pundbury manco team for Manco two who were also less than helpful on this telling me that the problem is with telstar and i should contact them to get my problem rectified.

So a tip to all experiencing problems as this is what i have done:

Fitted my own loft ariel and a masthead booster (a booster as close to the Ariel as possible to boost the signal at source) I have now connected this ariel using existing wiring to the coaxial wiring already installed in the house. The new ariel feeds to the main splitter box located in the cupboard under the stairs and loops to the rest of the outlet points in the bedrooms, kitchen and lounge. I dont use the telstar signal any longer. My reception is perfect and much more stable. I can now access more channels than ever using this setup. I also have perfect reception in the main bedroom and kitchen where other TV's run.

My broadband is pretty stable although does have a tendency to drop out occassionally. I'm with BT. i dont know about other providers. I run BT vision and this too is much better since the change to the loft ariel.

In short, I now have control of the TV signal. Trouble is i'm still paying for a service that is basically not performing.

Also had problems with Broadband speed. Tried Talk Talk and Virgin. Both claimed to be able to deliver 8mb and line tests confirmed it. Only ever got 1.7Mb, which is borderline for watching movies.

Solved it. Switched to BT. Engineer was a broadband speciallist. He took one look at the wiring and said he had never seen anything like it and could he take a picture! Wiring was from a master socket in a downstairs cupboard, right next to the main powersupply and distributed in a star network over three floors to 9 telephone points with some misconfigured andlooking like spagetti junction.

What he did...

Took one of the existing cables and sent this to a new master box for broadband, disconnected 5 of the phone sockets which we did not use anyway (we like most people use a wireless phone system anyway). Apparently the most phone lines a star network can be connected to is 4.

BINGO now getting around 7Mb

Sound as it was a wiring problem all along. Typical Poundbury!

I have just moved in and found that there was no master socket and the house phone wiring was faulty, I was getting 3mbps. I found a private telecoms engineer who installed a master socket and running through the test socket in that, I now get 7mbps, which is plenty.
I think that most peoples problems will be similar. There is nothing wrong with the exchange, get a telecoms engineer to check your house telephone wiring.
It may well be that a BT iplate will fix your problem but you will need a white normal BT master socket. Costs £75 to install a master socket and £10 for the iplate, including labour, but not from BT where I suspect this easy job would cost much more.