Q: Living quite a long way from the exchange I’ve always suffered from relatively poor broadband speed. A friend recently told me about the BT I-Plate, having had a look at it on the BT and other websites I have to say I’m intrigued. For around £7 it claims to offer between 1.5Mbps and 4Mbps improvement in speed on some lines and better broadband stability even if there’s no speed increase. Is this too good to be true or does it really do what it claims?
A: As part of its ADSL2+ rollout, BT is set to provide its own broadband customers with I-Plates for the cost of postage only. Customers of other ISPs that provide a Local-Loop Unbundled (LLU) service through BT’s ADSL network can, as you’ve seen, buy one from the BT site and other places such as www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk.
You first of all need to check that you have the right kind of BT master socket - it needs to have a split faceplate and the BT logo in the corner. Earlier sockets with a one-piece faceplate won’t work and newer ones with an OpenReach logo have the I-Plate technology built in already. Installation is quite simple – see the guide below.
The I-Plate works by isolating part of your internal extension wiring from your broadband. Extension circuits have a “bell wire”, this was needed to make old-fashioned telephones ring but is redundant with modern push-button models. However, its presence in the circuit can pick up interference that affects the broadband signal. BT estimates that around 9 million homes in the UK (some 7 out of 10) could benefit from having an I-Plate installed. You can get an idea of whether you’d gain from getting an I-Plate by plugging your modem or router into an extension socket and running a speed test – such as http://speedtest.net – then repeating the test with it connected to the master socket. If you get faster results when using the master socket then you’ll probably benefit from installing an I-Plate.
Installing an I-Plate may improve the speed of your ADSL broadband
Originally featured in PCU118
