Broadband Speedtest Results

[roach]

My 1Mb connection has been pretty stable for some time now until last week. I have found the speed to have dropped to less than a 1/2 Mb connection speed...talked to Pipex and completed some bt speedtesters, over the last 2 days these came up as 774,733, 764, then tody as 1901 and 1855Kbps. At the same time I tried a range of the usual online speedtests and they remained constant at less than 1/2 Mb. What now? Do I phone Pipex on Mon, wait 1/2 hr to talk to someone and convince them there is a fault or am I misreading something? Does the BT test mean that the line is good up to 2mb and Pipex are only putting out 1/2mb?
I welcome any advice!!

[SoftTop]

Have you listened to your phone? If you lift the handset and just listen, you may be able to hear some background noise or crackling. If that's the case, you need to have a chat with you BT fault line and let them know there's a line problem.

We lost our BB connection over Christmas last year! Nice lady down hole in street managed to reconnect a dodgy bit of wire on the 28th Dec. Kids were none too happy about that. Not to mention that the first bloke who tried to sort it managed to completely stuff the landline on Christmas Eve - and guess what, the spares department is shut over Christmas!

The other thing to try is to switch off your modem, leave it for about ten seconds and switch it back on. Sometimes they get a bit "confused" and rebooting sorts them out. Modern ones are less likely to suffer from "confusion" though as they are quite good at self-healing.

Other than that. You might try a complete virus check, with new virus definitions, same for the spyware stuff. It may be that you've got a "lodger" on your PC that's hogging bandwidth. There are a couple of sneaky ones that don't use the connection until you've got traffic running on it and therefore you don't see any activity when you're idle.

Do you use IE6 or Firefox (or any other browser for that matter)? If you have a couple of browsers available, try using one that you don't normally run and see if that makes a difference when you do speed checks.

Final thing might be to try a repair of your Windows (assumption) system.

If none of that lot works, or at least helps narrow down the problem, I'm sure one of the REAL gurus will be able to point you in a few other directions.

Good hunting

ST

[WeatherJinx]

Excellent summary of first line defences from SoftTop. As I'm sure a lot of others that frequent this forum are, I'm often called on by friends and rellies to 'have a look' at their PCs and in most cases, these measures fix or greatly improve the situation. I'd recommend the combination of a good AV application plus at least two decent Spyware apps (like SoftTop I'm assuming you are running Windows). AdAware (http://www.lavasoft.de) and SpyBot (http://www.safer-networking.org.) are effective. The secret to this is a regimen of regular updates and checks - weekly is good.

If this has not fixed the problem, then you'll need to inform your ISP of the BT Speedtest result (if you are with a BT-partnered provider, this is the only one that matters; the others are inherently unreliable and can only ever be indicative). A screenshot may be helpful. Other things you can try (which may help your ISP):

Pings/Traceroutes - your helpdesk should talk you through this and give you an IP address to interrogate, which may reveal faults in their infrastructure.

Exchange hardware - with the increasing take-up of broaband, BT exchanges can and are reaching their capacities - BT are trying to keep on top of this with a rolling programme of upgrades, but delays do occur. check your local exchange here (http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php) for any known issues.

Connection condition/Latency - sign up here (http://l8nc.com) (free) and follow the instructions to get a rolling, daily graph of the state of your connection - very techie but can help your ISP detect problems. Downloading your graph and sending it to them may be helpful. Hope you get it sorted. ;)

PS - another thing to try is to ask the helpdesk what the optimum MTU setting is for their service. If you don't know how to adjust this, they should be able to tell you.

[roach]

Thank you both for your informative posts, I appreciate the time you have taken to explain in detail.
I do run Win XP on a 3.2 Ghz 512 mb RAM PC connected through a D Link wireless router which is on a LAN cable to the main PC.
All has been well with Pipex for some years until last week and I just find it frustrating that I have to waste my life hanging on the telephone to talk to tech support!

[WeatherJinx]

You're welcome, roach..

Another thing I just thought of that may well be useful - do you keep up to date with the forum at ADSL Guide? (http://www.adslguide.org.uk) If not, there's a Pipex-specific board (http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=pipex&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0) there, where you'll be able to monitor the current state of things and ask questions.

Not sure about the Pipex board, but on my provider's board (Zen), tech support and other staff frequent it too - often a quicker way of acquiring help than using the phone!

[SoftTop]

The only other thing I can think of is that the contention ratio (probably 50:1 if you've got the same Pipex account type that I have) is starting to bite. Simply, it means that Pipex/BT can connect up to 50 users to the same access point in the exchange, as it heads off into the main Pipex trunk.

It may very well be that there are now a good proportion of the fifty slots being used and if they are all on at the same time downloading the latest Kylie album (or whatever) you will see a marked reduction in the performance of your link.

I haven't yet found a way to identify how many others are bolted onto my access point in the local exchange. All I know is that there can be up to 49 others alongside me.

So, next question: does the time of day make a difference to your surfing speed?

ST