Erratic Broadband Speed

[Harrison]

I don't live in the best area for Broadband as it is (rural). My local exchange is enabled for the 8Mb Max speed service, but on average I tend to get between 2-3Mb most of the time, and late at night it sometimes creeps above 3Mb, but not that often. I did once even see it up above 4Mb, but only once.

The strange thing is that I've never had a drop in the upload speed, with it always working at the full 448Kb speed, which is OK for seeding.

But this past couple of weeks the download speed seemed to be slower than normal so I've been doing some tests and it is being extremely erratic. Yesterday it was at about 2400Mb, then when I got home late in the evening it seemed really slow to do anything so I checked and it had dropped to 400Kb!!! :o Which is too slow for me to think that is acceptable. This morning it had gone back up to 1400Mb, and now it is back to 2500Mb.

Has anyone else been experiencing such large changes in their download speeds?

I did some quick searching online and a lot of people seem to be posting on forums saying their broadband connections are getting slower and slower each week and all think something is going on at British Telecom's exchange end of the connection which is causing this. Many think they are overloading the nodes and the only way they are going to fix it is to split them so less people are on each.

I'm going to be ringing my ISP tomorrow morning to ask them about this and to check they haven't actually introduced some sneaky traffic shaping crap on the connection (if they have I'm moving ISP). It does say they will check the connection and if they can't find the reason they will demand BT to open a fault request and make them test the line completely. So fingers crossed it is just some problem on the line and can be fixed.

Very annoying though, especially when you go our leaving a download running at over 200KB/s, coming back later thinking it will have finished and it is still going, but dropped down to something silly like 20KB/s.

[Harrison]

I decided to email my ISP's customer support this afternoon, and have already received an email back, in less than two hours, so that was good service so far (I've not really needed to contact them for a long time).

They confirmed what I thought: "I can certainly see a slight drop in your connection speeds over the last few months that reflects what you are suggesting, however, there is no real reason from my end that I can see what may be causing the issue."

So that is good. Now they are passing this issue on to BT tomorrow so hopefully they will be able to work out what the problem is.

[Buleste]

I hope BT can sort out your problem but at the moment its and arse and elbow situation with BT. I put in a complaint to BT in October and finally got a phonecall back yesterday asking if i'd received any response. Unfortunatly they've been cutting staff to maximise profits and it's customers who are being let down. I live in a rural area and know what it can be like with erratic speeds.

[Sharingan]

My ISP never delivers the theoretical maximum download speed either, but only 3 Mbit out of the advertised 8 Mbit? That would be unacceptable to me.

Maybe you should ask your ISP if it'd be fine if you only paid 3/8th of the monthly fee? That'd be perfectly fair, in my opinion! After all, they aren't giving you the product you're paying good money for!

[Harrison]

Sadly that is actually how everyone in the UK has to live with our broadband services. The 8Mb maximum speed is only the theoretical maximum speed and only those living in the local exchange would likely ever see speeds near to that. The average for most customers is closer to 5 or 6Mb/s, and for those of us living in more rural locations who have older lines with more noise we suffer more. BT stated when I did a line speed test that my line would only manage 2-3Mb at most due to the distance and line quality, so I have to accept it.

My ISP have however contacted BT and are waiting to hear back from them. The ISP also stated they are expecting to hear back tomorrow and will inform me of the findings.

Another good thing is that I asked the ISP about traffic shaping in the same email and got this information back in the same reply: "We do not currently have any traffic shaping on our systems, and I do not believe we are planning on introducing this either." So that is a good reason for me to stay with them if i can.

[Demon Cleaner]

I have "errotic" broadband speed ;) (which btw is awsome :D)

[Submeg]

I have "errotic" broadband speed ;) (which btw is awsome :D)

OH GOD HE USED THE FORBIDDEN WORD!!!!!!! :shhh::owned::nono:

[Demon Cleaner]

Aaaargh, wait I'll ban myself.. .. . .... . . . .

Demon Cleaner was kicked out of the forum by a higher force.

[Buleste]

Aaaargh, wait I'll ban myself.. .. . .... . . . .

Demon Cleaner was kicked out of the forum by a higher force.

My belief in God has been restored.:lol:

[Harrison]

I got another email back from my ISP's support as promised (so that is good). They state that BT have tested my line and have NOT found any problems. However the support have given me a long list of things to run through and test at my end to make sure it isn't an issue or fault with my router or internal phone wiring.

The suspicious thing however is that today my connection speed seems to be much faster again! :hmmm: You have to wonder!

[Buleste]

Thats a tsandard BT response. They say they check the line but found no faults however things are usually faster which suggests that whilst they did not find any faults they did tweak things to improve the line. That way they are strictly not lying as there was nothing wrong it was just inefficient. Sneaky B******s. I think it's a fine example of just another company ignoring the needs of rural communities in the hope that as they are all country bumpkins they won't know what real service is.

[Stephen Coates]

Mine goes slower towards the end of the month, but that is only because I tend to go slighty over my 1GB limit. Other than that, it seems fast enough. I never worry about things going slowly anyway. And most files that I download are under 20MB so don't take too long.

[Harrison]

1GB limit? :o

I went over my 360GB limit this month already! :lol:

[J T]

I'm with Virgin Media (nee Telewest). My broadband speeds of late have been fluctuating wildly. Big constant DLs run fine at full speed but browsing seems to take a long time to start connecting and loading up all the bits of the page (yes, I do mean when the p2p isn't running).

I'm not even sure if our flat has a BT phone line connection anymore. For now I can live with it.

Damn Virgin media.

[Harrison]

I've been hearing many people moaning about their Virgin Media services lately. More than when it was NTL! Which is hard to imagine!

[J T]

I've got a feeling (based on very very little knowledge or evidence) that Virgin simply have too many users and not enough bandwidth/equipment/capacity or however you want to call it.

And sadly, there's probably a very good chance I'm right.

[Harrison]

I think their biggest issue is that they inherited the infrastructure from NTL!

[Harrison]

I think my erratic broadband speeds are finally improving. After much searching online I found some information about different broadband modem settings that improve speeds on lines that sometimes suffer from excessive noise.

As I live in the country and out lines are carried via overhead cables along the side of the road, noise is going to increase when it get windy. A few different people suggesting changing the DSL Modulation on my Linksys router from Multimode or G.dmt to T1.413. I tried this and so far over the last few weeks I've seen a big improvement with speeds around 200KB/s at most times now.

There was mention that if line noise did get too bad that the broadband speed would still drop out, going back to modem like speeds. Switching the router off for 30 seconds to reset the connection was recommended when this happens. I've only had to do this once since changing these settings and it fixed it.

So fingers crossed I've got to the bottom of this annoying behaviour.

[Buleste]

Other than that you could try something like TuneUp Utilities 2008 which has an option for improving Internet connection and it's available on 30 day trial. I DL'd yesterday and it has tweaked things a bit.

[Harrison]

I don't trust any such utilities. Prefer to leave everything as clean and untouched as possible.

Also I never get how such utilities on the PC can help? The issue is the connection between the router and the local exchange so the PC has nothing to do with it. The LAN is fine. Just the external WAN.

[Stephen Coates]

Glad your speeds are better Harrison. :)

This isn't completely related to slow speeds, but I did read somewhere that disconnecting the pin which makes the telephone ring in the microfilter can make the connection faster. I've no idea how this works and I have no intention of trying it as at some point in the future I will probably want to connect a telephone which makes use of the said connector, but the posts which I read said that they had an improvement in speed as a result of doing so.

Anyone tried this or know how it could affect speeds?