REVIEW: Chorus' gadget for speeding broadband

 
REWIRED: Chorus' Service Delivery Point or SDP (above and below), is designed to be a cheaper alternative to spending $2000 to rewire your house. The Telecom network division says many homes have bung wiring, which puts a handbrake on broadband. 

I've just had a new gadget installed in my home that promises to boost broadband. Dramatically, in some cases. Keep reading to see how that went. First, some background:

Telecom’s networking division, Chorus, has long tried to educate home-owners that old wiring, or ineptly installed wiring, can badly slow down your broadband - no matter how close your home is to the nearest phone exchange or fibre cabinet, OR how fast your DSL broadband plan is on paper.

Now, motivated by a mix of commercial and political* concerns, Chorus is doing something about it, field testing a gadget called the Service Delivery Point (pictured above).

The SDP was conceived and designed by Chorus, then refined with help from Palmerston North’s Remote Monitoring Services (RMS), which has also organised the mass manufacture of the device.

Chorus is jumping into the home wiring business - via its partner ISPs (who include Telecom Broadband, Vodafone, TelstraClear, Orcon and CallPlus/Slingshot) - because its multi-year project to upgrade Telecom’s fibre network, and local exchanges and cabinets, is often thwarted at the curb as state-of-the-art broadband meets clapped out, jerry-rigged home wiring.

Cheaper than rewiring your home
Chorus General Manager of Product Management Brent Matthews explained: “Traditionally, the wiring in New Zealand homes has been connected in a daisy chain, running from jackpoint to jackpoint, and this in combination with older wiring slows down the user’s internet performance.”

And so it was in my home, where there was Cat5 cable (that is, modern ethernet cabling, as you'll find in a wired office) in an extension.

But between Telecom's lead-in cable coming into our home, and the gleaming new, Cat5 cable, was a Jurassic-era length of wiring.

Once installed, the SDPbecomes the first network connection point in the home your broadband connection - so you only require quality wiring back to the point where the phone network enters your home.

If a wi-fi/DSL modem is attached to the SDP, other broadband devices can connect to it wirelessly.

And rather than homeowners having to replace the rest of their wiring - which can cost up to $2000 or more - the existing wiring is then connected into the device so that traditional services such as phones, faxes and monitored alarms continue to work.

(Although my home's too far from an exchange or cabinet to qualify, the SDP also supports VDSL2, if you're wondering).

Sold through ISPs
Chorus currently has the first patch of around 1500 Service Delivery Points in production, with another 4000 to follow.

Retail ISPs are trialling the device at the moment; commercial launch is expected in a couple of months.

The device will be sold through internet service providers. A Chorus spokesman said it would cost in the region of “several hundred dollars”, and be priced to compete with installing line splitters or filters - the traditional ways of trying to patch a poor wiring job.

The exact price will depend on factors such as whether an ISP ties the SDP to a contract, bundles it with general home wiring inspection package, or sells it as a loss leader.

Potential partner ISPs, such as Telecom Broadband, Vodafone and Orcon, are still testing the device.

Not 50 times faster, but ...
Some over-excited early coverage had the Service Delivery Point boosting a home’s broadband speed by a magical 50 times (later downgraded by its author to a more modest 50%).

In reality, every home will differ depending on its age, and the conditioning of its wiring and its setup (amazingly, there is no official wiring standard).

Your location is also a factor. 

With broadband, geography is destiny (or at least it is with copper cable-based DSL, as opposed to fibre, whose bandwidth doesn't degrade with distance).

My experience with the Service Delivery Point
Over the past couple of years my home's broadband speed has nearly doubled. It started around 5-6Mbit/s before my area was upgraded to ADSL2+ (a faster flavour of DSL now available everywhere) and I got a compatible ADSL2+ modem.

Post ADS2+ I was in the region of 7-8Mbit/s.

A couple of months back, the connection between our home wiring and the lead-in from the street almost gave out altogether, and broadband sunk to a limping 1Mbit/s.

Getting a guy from Chorus in to fix the wiring saw us jump to over 9Mbit/s - to be specific, 9.55Mbit/s was the best I'd clocked on speedtest.net, early in the morning (as ever, speed always depends on traffic).

Given our home was about 2km from the local exchange (with the nearest cabinet about the same distance, as the copper snakes), and the shonkiest length of wiring had already been replaced, Chorus thought Chez Keall was already close to its theoretical maximum.

And so it was to be. After the SDP was installed, our broadband speed nudged up, but not dramatically, with 10.03Mbit/s becoming my new high.

Still, up over 10. Nice (my upload speed has remained arbitrarily throttled at 0.8Mbit/s throughout).

Bonuses: longer have to worry about old wiring stuffing out anywhere around our home, and voice call quality is clearer.

Home or small business consult
Because the SDP widget is only part of the solution, Chorus has also launched a "Next Generation Home Services" package, which sees an engineer checkout your home or small businesses' current setup, then offer upgrade options including Cat5 wiring, installing an SDP and putting in new jacks (older style jacks, from around 1997 and earlier, can be a broadband bottleneck). 

The service can also see Chorus supply options for integrating multiple broadband devices including (whisper it) VoIP handsets.

The SDP fits directly to the wall, in a new location or - as in my home, above - covering a space where an old jackpoint used to be.

This jack pictured above already had modern Cat5 ethernet cabling. But, in a common scenario for a house with a rear extension, there was a length of ancient copper wiring, partially degraded, between the new cable and the lead in from the street. Here's the offending length:

BELOW: The SDP installed: It's the anonymous white rectangular box on the left. Network cable links it to my wi-fi/modem router (at right).

What's next for SDP: fibre support
Although its first generation is aimed at homes with copper wiring running from the curb, the Service Delivery Point would be upgradeable to support a fibre optic connection, Chorus told Keallhauled.

The next generation would include a battery, so that a device running on a fibre connection - such as, say, a VoIP phone - could potentially maintain a connection through a power cut.

* Before approving variation 4 to Telecom's operational separation undertakings, Communications Minister Steven Joyce through in the extra provision that the carrier must resolving issues with security and medical alarms, and household wiring.