Here we are in our warm homes and with full tummies and in the UK at the top of our Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs pyramid can bizarrely be "I need my broadband to work!". Ok, I know we're deep in recession and things aren't so rosy generally but you get my point, the Internet and access to it can seem as essential as food and warmth when you don't have it!

I've managed the implementation of both wired and wireless computer networks across large factories and I thought I knew lots about what could break Ethernet networks. Over the last two years I've had persistent problems with my home broadband and taking an easy line and avoiding a proper technical investigation myself, I've wasted around 80 hours on the phone with my Broadband providers. This wasn't a good idea and I should have dusted down my technical know how earlier!

Initially with Tiscali, I moved to O2 because I found Tiscali's Customer Service impenetrable - I couldn't hear them and if I did, usually, I couldn't understand them because they were on the other side of the world! O2, so far, have given me fairly good Customer Service as measured by ability to communicate with them, however they failed miserably to cure my Broadband problems on their own.

Here are some factors that you can look at to self-diagnose if you have problems...

Before you look at the wires, look at the wireless!

If you use Wireless, just click on your network icon to see how many other wireless networks are near-by. You might be very surprised! From my home, I've logged over 20 networks, one being a friend's house 400 yards away! Ok, so what does it matter? Well, we only have 13 channels to use! And then, its actually worse than that because the channels overlap!

The technology is actually very clever and just as on your FM radio you don't generally get two signals at the same time, sometimes you can lose the signal and hear hash if you're walking around with your radio. In general, you're able to use the strongest signal but where neighbours are all on or near the same channel, the effect can be significant. You can download software to see what's going on around your house. I use NetSurveyor software which allows me to see a picture view of the spectrum (as below) and find out who is where. Each colour on the chart below represents a network id (SSID).

As you can see channel 1 has 3 networks on it and channel 11 has 4 networks on it - imagine a busy pub and calling to the bar "two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please!". This picture is only telling you what packets of data are flying through the air of course. There are likely to be other networks with no-one currently connected - these will be chattering less and therefore might not show up on a particular scan. Its worth watching the chart for a few minutes. I have seen my home network slow from 54 Megabits/second to 3 Megabits/second which is just useless!

Updated: interesting BBC story Home wi-fi 30% slower than fixed broadband

What can you do about wireless networks congestion?

You will usually find that your Broadband Modem/Wireless Router (aka Broadband Box) has an Administration menu which allows you to manually set the channel.

Most of these boxes will automatically select the channel but that doesn't mean that they make good choices they make. So an alternative is to check who's where and change the channel manually. However if you do this you will find that the spectrum picture changes fairly frequently so you have to repeat this. You will need information from your Broadband provider or Router instructions for how to change the channel if you want to do this.

What about the wires? How does Broadband get into your home?

The best way to carry digital signals long distances is through glass fibres where there's little resistance. Most of us however get our broadband through the phone lines, which generally consist of copper wires which go from our phone, outside to a pole and from there over or underground to the exchange. To get phone calls and broadband to use these wires simultaneously a filter is used both at the home end and at the exchange end. Those filters are really important, they let low frequencies (voice) pass through one socket and high frequencies (broadband data) through the other socket.

Ever had a radio volume control that crackles? That happens because the moving connection inside the volume control gets grubby as time goes on and the same problem effects every plug and socket involved in passing broadband from the exchange to your phone. Most of us have spawling phone extensions in our homes, a master phone socket, filters etc of course so when you realise how many connectors are involved you can see how many points of failure there can be!

When you ring up your Broadband provider they always want you to strip off all the home phone network and connect the bare minimum into your master phone socket - this reduces the connectors involved!

If you have home broadband problems, the best thing you can try is to unplug and replug each connector into each socket about 5 times - this will rub the connecting surfaces a bit so that the connections have a better chance of working. Incidentally, you can try the same thing with your radio volume control by winding it low/high/low/high etc and you'll find the crackles get less.

How do you know if you've had any effect?

You might have been told to run something called a Speed Test to see how fast your broadband is working. I prefer Ping Test because that is more concerned about the quality of the connection than the speed. When you start the program it looks for a server on the web that it can have a chat with and once its got chatting it checks for packet loss. Packet loss is a bit like listening to a conversation with odd words missing. How many times do you have to say to the speaker "pardon?". If you have more than 2 or 3% packet loss, your computer is saying "pardon?" a lot and much of the data going backwards and forwards is just repeats!

So run the program before and after you do your unplugging and replugging your connectors and see if the packet loss has got better.

Could the problem be my line?

The short answer is yes! Over the last 12 months, I've had line engineers come to my house and look at the equipment in the telephone exchange. In the Exchange they found that my wires and another subscriber's wires were chaffing with each other - this was causing voltage spikes on my line which overloaded my Broadband Box and caused it to reboot itself. They also found a neighbour's tree had grown in between my house and the telegraph pole causing the wires to be stretched. They changed the main telephone socket too. All of these have improved the state of my line!

Unfortunately our Internet connections are likely to be problematic for some time to come simply because they have so many points of failure or at least attrition but I hope I've shed some light on the issues which is perhaps a help.