Erratic Broadband Speed

[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?

I went over my 360GB limit this month already!

[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.