Beasley's Place

Time to report the December 2012 Broadband speed results, seems that it was a good month with a steady climb in the performance. Nothing else to report really.

But have noticed a number of cable companies (Virgin etc.) digging up around my road location. Lets hope that won’t cause any problems.

Another year has arrived and what has that brought?

Well until tonight I would have said a break from the rain, but that seems to have been short-lived. I wonder how long it will be into the year before the water companies begin to lay the foundations for the Summer hose-pipe bans they will aim to introduce.

At least there is some good TV to look forward to over the coming weeks and I have now managed to use some spare time to get through the backlog of our ‘Humax’ files courtesy of my share of the family Christmas virus variations. 3 weeks of a bad cough and sore throat… But I shouldn’t moan!!

Tonight saw the return of #bbcstargazing, perhaps that’s the reason that its decided to rain tonight! Still there were some good items on it, but I still can’t decide if Dara O’Brian is the right person to present this program, but I do think that his Science Club is a excellent program.

Talking of Space, we recently lost Patrick Moore, I remember the first time I met him many years ago at one of his open-house evenings at his house on Selsey Bill. A fantastic bloke and certainly increased my interest in astronomy. He will be badly missed by many people.

Really need to look into a new Desktop PC this year. Mine current PC is about to give up the ghost and with sales of them in the decline, there should be some good bargains around, the question is; to build my own again or not. I’ll have to have a good look around and post on what I find.

Figures pretty much back to normal after the October hiccup.

It seems that there was a glitch at some point in October with a drop down to 25Mb download. However after a few days we see a jump back up to the 33Mb mark and a possible slow climb further up.

Will we get to 35 Mb this month. Only time will tell.

Took this lovely picture of my dwarf Acer tree in my back garden last week. A very good colour this year

My saga of routers continued over the past month having gone through two more BT Infinity version 3 routers. Finally after another couple of days of ‘fault finding’ on my part BT finally agree to replace the router. Happily this one has a stronger wireless signal, it can now be used around the whole house and the wireless signal is now broadcasting constantly. However…

There now seems to be fall off in download speed! As can be seen fro other posts, previous months figures have been on average around the 33Mb speed mark, but I’ve noticed a drop of towards below 30Mb and at the time of writing, we are around 25MB! I have reported this to BT, but of course the usual responses have been given; Broadband Bandwidth, other people using the line etc. etc. I do wish BT would at least train their support staff to give out believable responses! I’ll what happens during October and send a copy into BT when I next report any further drop off.

I’ve received my letter from Wokingham Borough Council about the proposed additional Water Reservoir that Thames Water are proposing to build next to the existing reservoir.

All the relevant plans for the proposed development can be found on the Planning Application pages of Wokingham Borough Councils website. The planning application number to search for is F/2012/1824.

Comments are due in by 5th October 2012. Don’t miss the date to submit your comments.

An update from Thames Water’s point of view can be found on their main website.

Well it appears that it’s been while since I posted anything on this blog, must get better at that. One thing that I can post about is the past three months ISP figures. All seems to be quite on that front with pretty much the same performance download speed for June, July and August.

One thing that I am still disappointed about is that we are still not able to get anywhere towards the 70MB promised when the connection was upgraded to Infinity 2. I know that we will never get to a full 70MB speed, but it would be good to see it creeping up towards the 50MB mark.

One gripe I do currently have about the current BT Infinity 2 router is it’s weak wireless signal. Despite a number of calls to BT Broadband support they seem incapable of wanting to understand that this router is delivering a lower wireless power than my previous BT Infinity 1 router. Clearly if I can’t use a wireless device in the same place as I could with the previous router then it is not giving out the same wireless broadcast power.

Finally last Friday after making the usual tests for ‘them’, they have at finally acknowledged that there have been receiving calls from a number of BT users reporting the same weak wireless signal problem. I am told that once BT have collected more information they will make a decision and probably replace the unit. So I have a few more weeks to wait before I can get that one resolved. We will see what happens!

Anyway, here are the performance figures for the past three months.

Many of us were disappointed about the lack of visibility of the recent Venus transit due to the low cloud and early time of the event.

However I came across this interesting image of the transit and the International Space station in one shot.

I’ve also added the montage of images that I took of the last Venus Transit back in June of 2004 using a small telescope in my back garden.

We had a much better time frame then and obviously better weather that allowed me to get a near full transit recorded.


Not bad for the equipment I had at the time.

Now not only do you have to have your own twin pack of alcohol breathalysers with you, but it is now illegal to have the Speed Camera detection option active in your own SatNav. See this Telegraph article for more info about this and other motoring relating issues across the European countries.

Make sure the alcohol breathalyser test kit is an approved version by the French Authorities – as not everyone available in UK. You can find them at AlcoSense, Amazon and a number of other outlet if you search the Internet. These will be required to be carried by 1st July.

Make sure you know how to turn off the ‘Speed Camera’ detection in your SatNav before you get into France, I found two places in my SatNav that I had to un-tick’ to make sure that it was completely disabled. Check the documentation now as it better than getting as fine when in France.

Bonne journee!