Broadband Blues

[Mooncat]

This weeks stats, Yesterday is actually last Tuesday but download speed has hardly changed since.

[Mooncat]

Just checked download speed again, it's no better! Now, as son has moved out, we no longer need 20Gbits per month, so I reduced it to 3Gb/m, £20/month instead of £40. Is it possible that a smaller capacity is tied to slower download? If so, it should not!

[thescruff]

Your upload is very high to normal.

And download is never lower than up something funny going on.

[thescruff]

No it isn't I just realised you have lower start numbers

[chat_to_rich]

Just checked download speed again, it's no better! Now, as son has moved out, we no longer need 20Gbits per month, so I reduced it to 3Gb/m, £20/month instead of £40. Is it possible that a smaller capacity is tied to slower download? If so, it should not!

Having a smaller download allowance won't reduce your download speed. Have you changed ISP, router, or anything else to do with your phone line? Have you plugged your router into the BT master socket to see if that helps? Have you reported the slow-down to your ISP?

[Mooncat]

Thanks all, I'll check things out tomorrow. Router is plugged into master socket, only one phone connected, no extensions.

[tooltraderdirect]

Your bandwidth cap has nothing to do with download speed. It is the amount in Gigabyes GB you can download before your ISP takes action (extra charges, account cut off etc) Note that your cap is in Giga-bytes (GB) and the speed is in kilo-bits (k) or mega-bits (m), where one byte = 8 bits, so a download speed of 180kb /sec = 30kB (bytes) per second - so at a rate of 180kbps, you are downloading 30kB /second = 77GB per month. So you could still exceed your bandwidth allowance if your kids are leaving their laptops on running bittorrent or similar.

ISPs used to use bandwidth throttling for people who exceed their allowance, I don't know if this still happens.

To check if your downloads are of good quality, you can try using ping requests.

Open up a command prompt - start, run, cmd
Type ping -n 100 google.co.uk and it will ping google 100 times and give you some stats at the end. If you are getting a lot of packet loss or getting ping responses longer than a few hundred ms, then you most likely have a bad connection. This can be caused by kinks in the phone cable, a dodgy microfilter or a missing microfilter on one phone extension.

[Mooncat]

Ping shows as 348ms, seems too long to me.

[tooltraderdirect]

Is that the average ping response or just a single one? It is quite normal to get the odd one longer, but normal ping for most ADSL connections is 40-60ms. If that is your average for 100 ping requests, I agree it is too long. More serious would be packet loss but in 100 pings you might see 1-2 packets lost on an average BB connection. Packet loss of more than about 3% would indicate a problem.

[Mooncat]

Son says it is the router, so I'm getting another.

[tooltraderdirect]

Why did he draw that conclusion? What diagnostic did he use?

If you suspect hardware at your end, the first test I would try would be to plug the router directly to the master telephone socket, using a short cable (1-2m) - making sure you are using the microfilter and that all phone extensions are unplugged. Then connect the pc, or a laptop to the router by a network cable. Then repeat the ping test. If you notice a big difference, its the internal wiring. So you can eliminate that as a cause of the problem, and it costs you nothing. A distance of over 5m from the BT master socket is not recommended as it leads to signal degradation. If itsn ot that, its most likely to be the quality of the copper between you and the exchange. You can ask your ISP to test it for you and they can do things like adjust the attenuation.

[Mooncat]

We've done all those tests, no improvement. So it's raiding the piggybank again.