Slow Broadband? - join the club

[fleetelise]

SS HSV said:

Oh this could be my last post.. teh broadband is draining it must have a leak

your upload speed seems ok though?

[SS HSV]

fleetelise said:

SS HSV said:

Oh this could be my last post.. teh broadband is draining it must have a leak

your upload speed seems ok though?

yeah I know.. heres another



Not really wanting to host a webserver at the moment. It would be nice to browse the net without having to wait for 40 seconds before a page loads.

What would be really great would be if Virgin actually said that they have screwed up and that 'this' is at fault and they are working on it, but instead they take us all for s, continue to take our money then tell us that there is nothing wrong with it when of course there is

Hey you beardy tt. Stop flying around in hot air balloons and get your breardy face down here and fix this ing mess. My neigbours wirelss doorbell has more bandwidth than your connection you furry tt.

[joewilliams]

TheLearner said:

I am going to be exceptionally unpopular here. You get. What you pay for.

You've paid for a home user account, it has an SLA (Service Level Agreement) which basically states "if it sync's we're done". No minimum speed, no uptime guarantee and so on. Obviously, this is fine for most people and they roll their eyes and/or crap themselves when they see how much the business version of the same product costs.

But. It has an SLA, if it doesn't work... they hand you cash (not a lot, but) if it's not within the speed tollerance they fix it (or again, they're handing you cash). And because it's a business class product, you won't be dealing with low cost call centers for the most part (no guarantee, but business don't generally tolerate speaking to hard-wired script monkeys in Bangalore when their ADSL links st itself).

Now. Because you're on ADSL you can do the sensible thing, shove two fingers up to Virgin, buy yourself out the contract and ring up BT's Business ADSL sales line. If you were on cable, you'd just be screwed.

Quite.

For my own amusement, I've given complaining clients the quote for a 2Mb leased line. The look on their faces is always worth it

[Flat_Steve]

I posted a topic on this very subject not a week ago as I'm regularly getting download speeds like that, in the 20's or 30 kilobit range (!). Upload speed's fine but the download speed varies wildly, hitting a peak of 3.5mb just after everyone's left for work for some reason. My ISP's pinned the problem down to BT but BT won't do anything about it as my service is, in their words, 'within tolerances'.

So I'm stuck with a comically slow internet connection for virtually most of the time and there's seemingingly NOTHING I can do to fix it. Lots of others are in my boat and lots more are joining us every day!!

[TheLearner]

minimoog said:

0.11Mbps is twice dialup speed is it not? I seem to recall that BT can only shrug if your connection is above 400K, which this isn't. It's below even their miserable SLA (I think). In any event it's a diabolical speed for broadband, assuming it's accurate.

Whilst I agree, it's a diabolically slow speed, I'm willing to be good money the ISP's response is "yes, that's nice. And?"

minimoog said:

It could be down to your kit, or a line fault, or lack of capacity within the ISP's network. From the sound of it I'd bet on one of the latter two. If the ISP isn't being helpful I'd jump ship to one that is and who will push to have the poor performance investigated. My ISP IDNet had a brief networking issue today - I rang to ask them if they were aware and after 3 rings a real person picked up and said yes there was a problem being worked on, and would I like them to phone me and let me know when it was resolved? That's customer service. Normal home user account too.

Yes, it could be the kit. But, I'm sorry, there have been hundreds of threads about diagnosing your own kit, clearing crap out of the system and so on and so forth. It's a logically assumption that the OP has followed these... universal steps already.
Customer service, costs money. It costs more money that people are prepared to pay, obviously you've got a pretty good ISP there.

Mattt said:

I have BT Business at home, 2mb, and it's mostly ok - but their support staff are still foreign and crap. Apparently my router is the cause of all problems.

And if you push the escelation button what happens?

[Mattt]

It's all done through a corporate account so not much can be, or seems to be, done.

[Scraggles]

8 MB is upto 8 mb and theoretical max is about 7 mb or so, just swapped pipes over, went from ok to slow

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119... so changed pipes back and got
http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119...

much better

Think one of the pipes is used by lots of downloaders

free tip, the big companies who offer lots for little often give u little in return, probably pay more than most of u, but...

also play a lot of games, so low ping is needed, read that sky is 50 ms +

ping www.jolt.co.uk
Pinging www.jolt.co.uk [82.133.85.65] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=55
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=55
Reply from 82.133.85.65: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Ping statistics for 82.133.85.65:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 11ms, Maximum = 12ms, Average = 11ms

[jazzybee]

My Virgin Media results. Been using them for over a year now, never had to call Customer Support. As I said, only thing I am not happy with is the price, but I expense the cost as I need high speed access for work.

[Flat_Steve]

Scraggles said:

8 MB is upto 8 mb and theoretical max is about 7 mb or so, just swapped pipes over, went from ok to slow

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119... so changed pipes back and got
http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119...

much better

Think one of the pipes is used by lots of downloaders

How did you switch pipes?

[Noger]

VM have started throttling the service in the evenings. It was really bad last night, 350kbps, which considering my 3G wireless connection is over twice that, isn't a good thing.

The only thing to do is move ISP and pay for less contection I think. I have tried to talk to them about paying more to get ebtter service, but no go.

[CIS121]

Noger said:

VM have started throttling the service in the evenings. It was really bad last night, 350kbps, which considering my 3G wireless connection is over twice that, isn't a good thing.

The only thing to do is move ISP and pay for less contection I think. I have tried to talk to them about paying more to get ebtter service, but no go.

Virgin are gits. I phone them up to look into this. They sent me to BTs proper speed testing site:

http://speedtester.bt.com/

It returns 412k. Virgin put their speeds below:
100kps or more - acceptable on 512kbps products
200kbs or more - acceptable on 1Mb products
400kbs or more - acceptable on 2Mb, 4Mb & 8Mb products

GREAT!

Pay for 8MB, get 400k (1/20th)and VIrgin say this is acceptable.

I'm moving supplier!

[minimoog]

CIS121 said:

GREAT!

Pay for 8MB, get 400k (1/20th)and VIrgin say this is acceptable.

I'm moving supplier!

No other supplier will say any different, beacuse the line quality (which determines the speed, ISP restrictions nothwithstanding) is outside their control.

[Scraggles]

Flat_Steve said:

Scraggles said:

8 MB is upto 8 mb and theoretical max is about 7 mb or so, just swapped pipes over, went from ok to slow

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119... so changed pipes back and got
http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119...

much better

Think one of the pipes is used by lots of downloaders

How did you switch pipes?

was logged into one at [e-mail], logged out and logged in as [e-mail] noticed a big boost, currently http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119... is last tested speed

ISP is merula.net - they have 2 pipes and allow most people to swap, the people who seem to leave their net on downloading updates 24/7 seem to not have the ability to swap pipes. think they are on a pipe all for themselves

[philbes]

I have been with BTBroadband for a long time. Firstly with 512Kb, then 2Mb and for the past year on 8MB.

A couple of months ago my speed was down to less than 300Kb. After numerous phone calls and a visit by a BT engineer I (not the engineer!) discovered that BT were capping my line at 400Kb. The engineer got the cap removed and I now have 4.8Mb - 7.0Mb depending on the time of day. My cap now varies from 6.5 to 7.3Mb.

If you are using BTbroadband then http://speedtester.bt.com/ with tell you the speeed of your broadband and the level of capping. If you are not on BT it will still give some information. The site requires your broadband phone number. If it dispalys an error message just try again a few minutes later.

[m3sye]

I have been having similar problems..only Tiscali decided to do a test on my line and the results came back that there was a fault on my line..

Interestingly to... I have been unable to download anything through the day.. downloads at 1kbps and as soon as she came back on the phone after doing the test that improved to 15kbps ..which I know is crap but 15x better than it was lol

I await the call from BT

[Scraggles]

tiscali eh ? cheap deals are so great, guess they are so cheap as u get throttled, capped and messed around ?

http://www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk/results.php?t=119...

not seen speeds that low, except when was with eclipse and they are an isp that would recommend to people i not like

[skeggysteve]

Question: does that download speed mean 3.3meg?

I recently moved to Virgin because they offered the 8megs which my previous ISP did not.
I read a lot about the 'training' in the first few weeks and found this which may be of help to others:

Click here

[Noger]

Yes, 3.3Mbps.

[skeggysteve]

Noger said:

Yes, 3.3Mbps.

Thanks for that.

I was getting 5.6meg in the first week so I think I'll have to do some investigating!

But as my previous ISP was only 2meg and I've now got 3.3meg for half the price don't suppose I should complain to much!