Broadband Uptake & BT DACS Boxes

[Bobinovich]

Firstly is it possible to find out how many people have Broadband on a particular exchange?

Secondly, has anyone had any experiences with getting a BT DACS box removed from their line(s) in order to have Broadband instead?

I know someone who's being quoted somewhere in the region of £5k by BT to have one removed!!! I've looked through the Ofcom website and done a web search, and have ended up recommending they contact their ISP and let them deal with it. Alternatively they can contact Ofcom and get them to put pressure on BT directly.

Cheers

[Brizer2k2]

I have personally dealt with several customer's who actually had Broadband ordered, installed, but when they started to use it, really bad connection problems or no connection at all.

When eventually we got a BT engineer to the customer's site they found that DACS equipment was fitted. It took months and months for BT to remove it.

DACS is not picked up on as far as I know when the initial ADSL availability check is done in the pre-order process. see this link on The BT wholesale site - http://www.btwholesale.com/adslchecker

If nobody knows what DACS is, it is a way BT used to save money several years ago, which saw them fit this DACS box to split a line into two and provide 2 lines from one piece of cable instead of installing a brand new line.

Made sense really when data wasn't that important and the line was just used for voice calls and the good old fax machine.............but when The popularity of The Internet increased and required initially analogue (9600, 14400, 36000, 56k, V90, V92) modems, then now ADSL, a line which has DACS is almosst totally useless for data transfer.

With regards to the other point about finding out how many people are ADSL users at your exchange, then an ISP will only tell you the contention ratio of your ADSL connection e.g. for DSL 512k normal conncections Nildram users have 50:1 which means up to 50 users will be connected to the piece of equipment your connection is on at the exchange.

For 2 meg connections and 512k pro then the contention is 20:1.

You could never find out exactly how many users were on ADSL at your exchange.

[Bobinovich]

Thanks for that Brian. After a bit more delving it appears that the fitting of a DACS box was quite acceptable - even to provide a 2nd Internet-only line. As long as the customer was getting a minimum of 28.8kbps it was considered fine.

That's all very well for BT as it saved them the cost of running new cables but with no due consideration for the customer's sanity obviously.

It's a shame about the ADSL uptake information but maybe it will become available in the future.