First-world problems

Here I sit, a privileged member of the middle classes in one of the most privileged countries on the planet. 99% of the global population have serious life-affecting problems (you know: hunger, poverty, disease, shelter) which I fervently hope will never cross my effete brow.

OK, with all that out of the way:

ADSL. Copper Wiring, in particular, has been vexing me somewhat recently.

I've had, for the last 4 years, a very reliable connection that over time has increased in speed from 2MBit/S up to about 10MBit/S briefly. For most of that time I've been nicely and reliably connected at about 6Mbit/S, or in english numbers about 600KByte/Sec peak.

Now it's clear that there's only so far you can go with old copper wires originally put in to support a fairly basic-quality voice link. ADSL-Max (or whatever it's branded as; that which delivers ADSL2+ at least) is, from my experience, as fast as we're going on this infrastructure.

I'm about 3KM in cable distance from the exchange. I get about 40db attenuation, and have consistently gotten 1/2 to 2/3rds of what I've been promised (all those "up to XXX" ads - very disingenuous). Frankly, as long as it's stable and reliable speed has been a second priority.

My exchange got enabled for ADSL2+ last summer. I saw a re-sync and speed up - temporarily - from about 6Mbit to about 8Mbit down (and occasionally from 100Kbit to 500Kbit up). Then my ISP did their bit of the upgrade in April. Speed (which had dropped back to 6Mbit) went back up to 8Mbit (occasionally 9) and upload went up to 1Mbit then back to 500Kbit. All well and good.

Then the bad weather came at the end of May. Oh, and I got a new router - must declare my own actions in this I guess - in an effort to get faster speeds (a DG834GT apparently has a better chipset for higher-noise environments. Apparently). Worked great for exactly 1 day, then I went through 2 weeks of connection hell. Up, down, re-syncs, speed ups, slow downs and for considerable periods of time a line that went up and down on a 2-minute cycle. Ever tried web browsing when you've got a connection for 30 seconds in every 2 minutes?

I can't say what solved it - calling my ISP and having them "monitor the connection" certainly made a big difference, and it's been up for 8 days now. And what's worse is that I can't say what caused it either - notionally it would be plugging in a new router, but the problems persisted when I reverted to the old router. In fact they got worse.

The biggest correlation was a period of extremely heavy rain. Is it possible, therefore, that my internet connection depends on how damp the bits of copper connecting me to the world get?

Roll on the Fibre upgrade, that's all I can say...