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Broadband house-moving woes
July 25th, 2004
One of the downsides of working mainly from home is that I’m absolutely beholden to broadband availability, to the extent that there were large swathes of the area surrounding York that were off-limits as far as moving was concerned because they’re not ADSL-enabled. Basically, without either broadband or cable I’d be screwed - there’s just no way I’d be able to go back to dialup, and the alternatives like satellite aren’t exactly much better.
So part of the house-hunting process has involved getting hold of the phone number (overtly or otherwise) and running it through the availability checker at the first opportunity. The trouble is, that’s only 80 - 90% certain, and it’s that 10% risk that I’ve had to work around. What’s made it even more complicated is that at the new place, the previous owner has moved out and taken his number with him already. So I’ve ended up taking over the line before we’ve even exchanged contracts, and ordered ADSL from PlusNet just to see if it’s available or not. Best case scenario is that it is, and I end up paying line rental and ADSL service charges for a month or so before we actually get to move in; worst case scenario is the ADSL install fails and I end up paying out three month’s worth of line rental in a house that we then can’t buy.
So far it looks OK - although the BT checker mentioned long line lengths, we’d be no more than about 2km as the crow flies from the exchange, and the site is saying 2Mb should be possible. And everything’s gone through the initial stages with PlusNet, so fingers crossed it’ll go OK. But I’m still not going to exchange contracts until I’ve physically attached a router to the line and got a working connection. Which I guess makes me paranoid…
Filed under Geek |2 Responses to “Broadband house-moving woes”
As a fellow yorkie - my understanding is that all three of the main York Exchanges are enabled, plus 3 of the 4 smaller ones? I’m sure that’s right. It ought to be quite tricky to find somewhere in York that isn’t okay. The line length from exchange is a bit of a get-out for bt, for areas where the cabling is old. Certainly 2km should be no worries at all, and they always have the option of upping the signal strength which adds 1km reach effectively. I am 3.5km from the exchange here in bishopthorpe and there is no problem at all.
The very thought of dialup modemness brings me out in a cold sweat.
I think pretty much all of York is OK exchange-wise, but then I can pretty much guarantee if anyone’s line is going to be dodgy, it’ll be mine. Last time we bought a house I discovered far too late that it was in a TPON area, and NTL pulled their network rollout three weeks after we moved in citing budget cuts…