DOWNLOAD SPEEDS

[Buggyman]

Hi everyone, I wonder if you can shed light on problem I have at the moment.

Living in the sticks my download speed has never been great. around 1Meg on a good day with occasional bursts up to 1.5. Just before Christmas my speed dropped like a lead balloon and the best speed I have managed since then is 424kbps but it is mostly around half that. For example I have tried to download the Alphasim Catalina this morning a mere 36MB and it has been in progress for over an hour at - wait for it - 37.6kbps! Facts to note; the lines are new - put in when the house was built 6 years ago, my neighbour is getting 1.8MB, I have not made any changes to my PC. I have, however, had a good look into the case and tried to wriggle, push, pull at the wireless unit, I have tried turning the modem (ADSL thingie) off and leaving it for a couple of hours and then re-connecting, I have also tried the modem on different BT sockets throughout the house without any sign of improvement.

So: is it the actual modem? It is a Wanadoo (then Orange, Now EE) box supplied in 2004 or is it good old BT? We have had frank discussions with BT over the quality of the landline in the past with the local engineer insisting its perfect and his sidekick saying it is crap and we did get a slight gain in quality a couple of years ago - we are almost 2 miles away from the local exchange.

I am at a loss as to what to try next so any suggestions (well, almost any) will be gratefully received.

ATB



Allan



Oh, by the way the Catalina download has just died - timed out after 1 1/2 hours - only 87% completed.

[DaveB]

Hi Allan

Difficult to point the finger in any single direction mate but I'll tell you what I had happen here. When BB was connected back in Feb 2012.. I wasn't living in the house but popping up once or twice a week. Speed was fine.. better than I expected at around 550KB/Sec. We finally moved in in mid March and it started going downhill.. so much so in fact that even going online was a pain. Speed was similar to what you're seeing. I got in touch with Plusnet who said everything looked fine though they would monitor the line. They saw quite a few errors over a 24hr period so sent a BT engineer out to have a look. He checked my local box half a mile away and it showed 7mb there. At the telegraph pole across the road, it showed a max of 5mb so to all intents and purposes.. I should be getting around 4.5mb at the house. He put a new line in and still it wasn't much above 2mb. He then got in touch with an engineering bod at BT.. I guess where the local hub was and found that my system had reset itself. I can't remember the exact terminology but you should keep your router on all the time. I'd been doing that but it had kept dropping BB. The 'system' kept seeing these outages and automatically cranked my settings back in an attempt to get a stable connection. Unfortunately, it had dropped so many times and been reset by the system so many times, my BB speed at the hub (the BT gateway not my router in the house) that it had dropped to modem speeds. He asked them to reset the figure to 4500kbps (allowing for a bit of signal degradation from the house to the telegraph pole) and I got about 3.9mb straight away.

I wish I could remember that the correct terminology was so I could tell you to get an engineer to check it for you but I hope you get the gist of what I've been trying to say. The old line was ok.. the router was fine but a succession of outages (reasons unknown) forced the system to drag my speed down until it was untollerably slow. This number was reset and up went my BB speed. It may not be this problem you're seeing but it's worth a shot

ATB
DaveB

[TSR2]

Hi Allan,

That old Wannadoo box will need to go. You'll probably find it only supports the original incarnation of ADSL and in most area's you can get ADSL2 or ADSL2+ these days. If you go here and plug your landline number in, it will tell you what they would expect to be able to deliver with respect to speeds. If you post what it spits out back here we can see if we can help

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/main.html

[Buggyman]

Thought the old box was past it.

Tried the BT test which told me that the line wasn't registered to BT or it was a new line! So, tried ma-in-law's line and it was registered and then - on retry - that my line exists after all. Interesting results between the two lines considering we are in the same house, same box etc:

ADSL Max up to 2Mbps
WBC fixed rate = 1Mbps (2 for mum)
Fixed rate = 1Mbps (2 for mum)

So, I guess the first thing is to get a new box - any advice on which is best alue?

Next is to try and get the BT engineer to do something with the line - this is going to be the hard bit because he has been such an @rsehole in the past.

Plan B would be to open up a new broadband contract on mum's line which is already listed at 2Mbps and might be the simpler option.

[speedbird591]

Are you downloading over wireless? Interference can easily slow it down. Have you checked the speed by plugging an ethernet cable directly into the router and is there a speed difference between that and the wireless? Have you got filters on all phone sockets including TV boxes etc? If so, check that they are all working.

If the wireless speed is slower than cable then one of your neighbours may be overlapping channels. Try moving to another channel using 1,6 or 11. You can see what channels your neighbours are using by downloading InSSIDer from here
http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider/

I would try those before calling out an openworld engineer. And a new router would definitely be useful but check the above first or it may still not perform to its max.

Finally. File downloads are much quicker if you use the Firefox plugin 'DownThemAll'. You can pause and restart the download with that as well.

Ian

[Tomliner]

Allan,you mentioned various BT sockets around the house.The First (primary) socket should be an NTE5E ,IIRC.Any other socket should be a secondary socket which has no capacitor inside.The incoming line should be connected to the primary socket first and the router connected there.Additional sockets then wired from there.I'm sure there is wiring info on the web.
After a problem has occurred,the BB can become 'capped' and needs to be reset by BT. EricT

[TSR2]

Hi Allan,

Not sure about Ian Firefox comment but the rest of what he says is definitely worth checking. The only reason I mentioned the new modem was that some of the old modems didn't support ADSL2, ADSL2+ or ADSL MAX. Either way you're not going to get more than 2 MB. To this end it might be worth speaking to Sam Knows. They were running a campaign for areas that couldn't get any more than 2MB and were asking for people to send them details. I can't find the link now, but I stumbled across it last month. I'll have another look tonight.

[speedbird591]

Not sure about Ian Firefox comment

me neither!

I've got all the main browsers for testing web pages but I only use Chrome (shut up, Ben! )

But when REX released Essentials and all the servers were blocked, I was thinking about a download manager and read on a forum about this plugin. I tried it and was very impressed by the speed and stability. So now I use Firefox for big downloads (e.g. Orbx scenery) but nothing else. The plug in is donationware.

Ian

[speedbird591]

I nearly forgot the BT iPlate! BT recommend this for older systems. Read the info to see if it's suitable for you.

http://www.shop.bt.com/products/bt-ipla ... -58LT.html

Ian

[Buggyman]

Thanks for all the advice guys I really appreciate your taking time help me out.

Last night the download speed was down to 123kbps; so slow that I couldn't get my ISP home page to open. This morning I was in Edinburgh so dropped in to PC World and picked up a Netgear N300 ADSL2+ and some new filters.

Spent the last couple of hours shifting furniture and re-locating wires. Changed the location of the old router to the main input in the office and noticed a much improved 654kbps but this died down to 300kbps when averaged out over half a dozen speed tests. On successful installation of the Netgear router + new filter my first speed readout was 1.6Mbps with a second reading of 1.8Mbps! A quantum leap in peformance.

So it looks as if the old modem has had it's day - not bad though it was installed in 2004!

Looking forward to being able to download a few files now.

Many Thanks.


Allan