Old Post Office Belper

 Our cottage in Wirksworth and a friend's house suffered an Internet Broadband outage last week, and it continues. The cause was a lorry flattening a BT street Cabinet. The friend works from home and has a Sky Business broadband service which is wired (phone line), but with a 4G Wireless dongle as a back-up. She is able to continue working at her PC. What I found interesting is the difference in service quality between the Wired and the 4G wireless. The first chart shows the 4G, with the single PC a couple of metres from the WiFi Access Point.: The second chart is the wired Internet at the Old Post Office, which has the same network equipment and similar "bandwidth" of Internet speed. It is measured over the same timeframe. One probably cause is that many of the local houses will also jumped onto the local mobile phone network to access the Internet while their phone lines are down.

 The Old Post Office on Bridge St in Belper was built around 1805. So far as we can tell it was two adjacent buildings merged together, Some of the walls are stone and some are Georgian brickwork. The interior of the 6 bedroom end-of-terrace house is a long "L-shape", though this is not obvious from the street. Some of the interior walls are thick brick/stone work. The structure/shape is not conducive to easy WiFi network distribution for modern day Internet.  The Grade II Heritage Listing effectively limits any changes to the fabric of the building. Part of my work involves international video conferences, so one of the back bedrooms away from the noise of the busy A6 Main road is used as an office, with green-screen and acoustic insulation. We also have two separate (diverse) Internet links with a combined capacity of 400/100 mbps (download/upload) servicing our internet usage. The network normally load-shares between the two broadband services, if one fails for any reason ...