OFSO said...I had big problems here with my Spanish ISP which is owned by British Telecom.
Same here so I guess we are talking Telefonica. When we first moved out here to rural Andalucia back in 2006 Telefonica's idea if ADSL was 256Kbps down 25kbps up... little better than dial-up. Two years or so passed and T'fonica upgraded our system to 1Mbps and almost immediately to a new 3Mbps / 320kbps system. All was well for about a year and then as more villagers bought computers and demanded internet access the system slowly went downhill. Couple that with the fact that about 18 months ago T'fonica farmed out their repair and maintenance contracts to a company called ITETE.
Since then the whole ADSL system has gone to ratsh*t.
I have been calling T'fonicas Tech help line on average about once a month for eighteen months now to complain about decaying ADSL speeds; my contracted 3Mpbs / 320Kbps service normally returns speeds of around 2.5M /270K and this is acceptable for our normal use. However we can only ever get this for around 3 weeks at a time; normally the download rate decays to around 650K although the upload rate remains fairly constant.
So as regular as clockwork I call them to report the new fault, they come out to the switching centre in the village, do their repair thing and go away and all is well again for about three weeks then it all starts again.
Lately however its the other way around... on the whole our download speed varies with the time of day and hence system loading but is generally >1M, it's the upload speeds that have decayed; typically down to <10k. I called them on 4th Oct and was advised that there was a general problem for our village that was being attended to; sure enough speeds increased after 24hrs but within a couple of days things were just as bad as ever. So I called them again... my original incident report had been closed. This time I used their online tech. chatline; agent said he would check the line from his location, he did so and returned a no fault found diagnosis; he suggested I use the T'fonica (Movistar) speedtester so I did and sure enough got 2.7M / 270K result. I thanked him for tweaking whatever he had tweaked and signed off... 15 minutes later just as bad again 2.5 / 0 (zero). Since then its been the same story every day; downloads are time of day and traffic dependent but uploads are all over the place varying between 0 and no better than 90k.
I should point out that we have 3 computers all cable connected to the router, we don't use the wifi facility. All three computers show the same results when I use either speedtest.net or movistars own dedicated speed tester.
I sent their tech line an email last night (again) outlining the recurrence of the problem and got a reply this morning... my email has been forwarded on the tecnicos...
I have serious doubts about the capabilities of ITETE (Granada) engineers; a search on the internet provided an insight from a former engineer of theirs which is far from good.
Like OFSO I am seriously considering an email to the CEO of BT...
But as in so many rural areas of Spain, T'fonica are the only game in town... its pointless changing our ISP because others piggyback onto the same crappy infrastructure. Cable and or Fibre optic isn't going to happen in my lifetime at this location. Wimax is not an option we don't have line of sight to a mast and satellite is just way to expensive, is capped for traffic and has a most unfair Fair Usage Policy.
Why the hell they cant get their act together and sort it once and for all? What really gets to me is the fact that if we lived in one of the main cities we could have 20 or 30M fibreoptics for the same price we are paying...
pp