Very slow broadband

penrhyn

What are your router line statistics?

Cottage_Economy

Sorry penryn I can't copy and paste the data very well - I'll try and put it into a format that shows the data laid out properly


A quick line speed test shows I'm now at 6.1 mbps.

kwikbreaks

By all means thank BT but the chances are it was fixed automatically....

You had a line fault.

The fault caused a drop in sync speed and Dynamic Line Management routines (software running in the equipment at the exchange) to drop your IP profile to a low throughput to match the low sync.

The line fault was fixed.

The DLM noted the restored sync speed but as usual dragged its heels before restoring the IP profile.

It is very rare for any manual changes to be made to the automated line management settings.

Cottage_Economy

WAN
Status PPPoA
TxPkts 23794
RxPKts 37560
Collisions 0
Tx B/s 369
Rx B/s 4738
Uptime 02:39:36


LAN
Status 10M/100M
TxPkts 33282
RxPKts 3764
Collisions 0
Tx B/s 101
Rx B/s 7
Uptime 16:05:28


WLAN
Status 11M/54M/150M
TxPkts 122665
RxPKts 94886
Collisions 0
Tx B/s 2118
Rx B/s 361
Uptime 12:38:3


I've got to go out now but will be back this evening if you need any other stats.

Cottage_Economy

kwikbreaks wrote: »

By all means thank BT but the chances are it was fixed automatically....

You had a line fault.

The fault caused a drop in sync speed and Dynamic Line Management routines (software running in the equipment at the exchange) to drop your IP profile to a low throughput to match the low sync.

The line fault was fixed.

The DLM noted the restored sync speed but as usual dragged its heels before restoring the IP profile.

It is very rare for any manual changes to be made to the automated line management settings.

Thanks for the info Kwikbreaks.

I do think that the person I spoke to had a hand in helping the problem be resolved as it certainly wasn't resolving itself until I spoke to them and they checked our profile.

We had been at 217-225kbps since at least Thursday when I first did a speed test.

kwikbreaks

Those stats aren't the ones Penrhyn will be interested in. He would have liked to see stuff about Sync speed, Attenuation, and noise margin etc.

===

It could be you had your profile changed manually but it isn't unusual for it to take anything up to several days to automatically recover after a fault is fixed - how long depends on how badly out of kilter is was.

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/IPprofile.htm

~ What is "Adaptive Max Logic"?

Decreases in sync speed will still reflect in the IP profile within 75 mins.
Increases in sync speed will depend on the percentage of the increase and will vary between a few hours and up to 5 days.
A large % increase in sync speed should see the IP profile rise within 4-6 hours, whilst a small increase may take up to 5 days before the IP profile reflects the change. BT estimates that under "Adaptive Max Logic" more than 60% of increases will now occur before they would on the old 3 day system.

Examples:-

1. - Large increase - Line dropped to a 576 sync during a thunderstorm (profile = 500), after a resync it went back up to 7616 (profile 6500). Profile increase = 6000/500 *100 = 1200% increase which should occur in 4-6 hours.
2. - Small increase - Sync increase from 7616 (profile 6500) to 8128 (profile 7150) after interleaving removed. Profile increase = 650/6500*100 = 10% which may not take effect for 5 days.

How long it exactly takes for increases to be applied would also seem to depend on how busy the system is.

Cottage_Economy

Hi kwikbreaks

I'm on someone else's system now so when I get in I'll route out those stats.

To give a bit more information, this slow broadband has been ongoing for many months, it seems ever since we were disconnected by an engineer in March time. We got our service back after about 5 weeks, but at a lower speed. We had been so mucked around by the Indian call centre I didn't want to ring anyone again so we left it. We could surf, email and watch iPlayer programmes without buffering issues so that was fine.

Then sometime in September it dropped again, and we couldn't watch iPlayer without buffering problems, then it dropped further at the beginning of last week making surfing a lot slower, and then after the phone line was sorted on Thursday it dropped down the appalling low level of 217-225kbps where we had problems doing anything much. It probably was due to our phone line degenerating. We had a low level hiss on the line back in spring which got progressively worse until it was unbearable at the beginning of last week. The engineer that came out on Thursday said our phone line dropped off the pole when he touched it, and he had to reconnect it.

So after months of ever decreasing speeds (which I'm now thinking is probably tied into the degeneration of our phone line), to rock up to 6.1mps after speaking to BT I'm assuming was something someone has done in response to my call....???

Or am I giving away too much credit ;-)

kwikbreaks

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

Or am I giving away too much credit ;-)

IMO yes. Nothing you've posted goes againt the speed variations all being down to the DLM response to a faulty line. I'm guessing your router was still turned on as the enginner swapped out the drop cable. The sudden disconnection and open circuit would have been the final insult needed by the DLM to really screw back on your speed.

That said is should have recovered quite quickly automatically so it isn't impossible that somebody you spoke to managed to get BT Wholesale to intervene manually although it shouldn't really have been necessary.

Cottage_Economy

Hi Penryn and kwikbreaks

I think I've got the stats you were after (is connection speed the sync speed?), but we're a bit slow downloading here tonight at around 4mb:

Connection Speed
Downstream 5248 Kbps
Upstream 448 Kbps

Line Attenuation
Downstream 36.4 dB
Upstream 21.5 dB

Noise Margin
Downstream 12.0 dB
Upstream 13.0 dB

These are the only stats I can find on the netgear site that look about right.

kwikbreaks

You still have a high target noise margin - default is 6dB.

Bad news -this is reducing your maximaum speed.

Good news - now that the line fault is fixed providing it all remains stable there will be a slow reduction of the target first back to 9 then to 6dB which will lead to further increases in your maximum speed.

The high target noise margin shows that there was no manual reset of your profile back to defaults - the improvement you got was down to the standard software doing its job.

Are you running your router on an extension? The reason I ask is because even with the elevated margin I would have expected a little more speed from a 36dB attenuation line. If it is ADSL2+ then it's definately lower sync than it should be.