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Old 30th Jul 2009, 13:16
  #11 (permalink)  
Skyfan
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Manchester
Age: 53
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All I can really talk about is my own experience but it may be of some use, not sure. Some time ago I was having similar problems with an 'up to' ISP. The contract stated 'up to 8mb/s' the reality was 1 or less for much of the time, including extended 'outages'. After several months of an eighteen month contract and many pointless phone calls to said ISP, I started to ask around and do some homework.

The upshot of this was something called SNR (Signal/Noise ratio). It essentially measures the quality of the line on an ADSL connection. Most routers can/do monitor this as part of their standard ops. It's affected by distance from the exchange but also by other interference factors (too many to mention here)

It has two components - an upstream and a downstream, looking at it you will see figures such as 20/5 or 30/10 etc etc. If either of those are outside a reasonable level (available on google but you'll need to judge it for yourself based on circumstance) you can make a good case for it being the ISP's problem (you can't get the JCB out and fix the line yourself, presumably ).

My own stats were way outside an acceptable level as you could clearly see the router desperately trying to hang on to the connection for 90% of the time, and the contract was terminated with no arguement.
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