Very slow broadband

Cottage_Economy

Do you mean power extension or phone line extension? The router is plugged into an extension cable at the moment, although with some jiggery pokery I can get it plugged directly into a wall socket.

For some reason this evening I am being repeatedly thrown off. Disconnected 7 times in about 2 hours.

Cottage_Economy

Well we're on course for another unsuccessful evening trying to watch anything streaming with minimal interruption.

The speed seems to have held at 4.1mb over the last couple of days regardless of the time of day and peak usage times.

Stats tonight:

Speed: downstream 6304 Kbps, upstream 448 Kbps
Attenuation: downstream 36.3 dB, upstream 21.5 dB
Noise: downstream 8.5 dB, upstream 23.0 dB

Just to add, the router is plugged through filter/splitter straight into what I think is the master socket, and currently directly plugged into the test socket. I've never had it plugged into an extension - the master socket is a new one that was installed about a year ago after we had the line moved from the back of the house to the front (don't ask! Cowboy previous owners)

closed

you shouldn't have any problem with those speeds, which appear the wrong way around

Cottage_Economy

closed wrote: »

you shouldn't have any problem with those speeds, which appear the wrong way around

Cheers! Just changed them round.

I was so hopeful on Sunday too. It was wonderful to be so fast at 6.1mb.

closed

it's 6.3 now, whats the problem

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics#results

Cottage_Economy

closed wrote: »

it's 6.3 now, whats the problem

I get 4.1mb if I'm lucky and it's not enough to watch something on iplayer or youtube without buffering a lot. Nine months ago we could be watching something streaming without any visible buffering at all.

Large downloads such as updates or new software are timing out before being finished.

etc etc.

And I keep being disconnected and having to put in the password access the broadband.

closed

4.1 download should be enough, (unless your isp is throttling) especially for standard definition

Putting in a password where? - Are you using a router, are you using a wireless connection

post a hijackthis log, step one of the speedup sticky thread above

kwikbreaks

Cottage_Economy wrote: »

Do you mean power extension or phone line extension? The router is plugged into an extension cable at the moment, although with some jiggery pokery I can get it plugged directly into a wall socket.

The major problem that ADSL has is that phone ring wires act as antennas and the medium wave signals they pick up get transferred back to the signal pair through a capacitor in the master socket where they are just noise and mess up the ADSL signal.

====Blast - just realised you mean a power extension which is irrelevant - I'll leave all the stuff in about ring wires for anybody else that chances on this thread but it obviously doesn't apply to you although rechecking your profile post the resyncs down at the bottom of my post is still worth doing====

There are ways around that the simplest being to disconnect the ring wires at the master socket end - as all ADSL filters recreate the ring circuit this doesn't matter to the phones themselves as they will all be on filters.

Plugin extensions though can't have the ring wire inside them disconnected without being attacked with side cutters or a knife so when the router is operated on one the ring wire inside it introduces noise onto the signal pair. This will still happen even with the new master sockets BT are introducing which build the iPlate directly into them.

Read up on ring wires - http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm

If you can avoid running your router on an extension it should improve. If it is a hard wired extension the page about shows how to disconnect the ring wire from that.

Check your profile again - http://speedtester.bt.com/ if noise has caused a slow resync it will have dropped again. You shiuld only need a couple of Mb or so for acceptable streaming so if you aren't getting it at those sync speeds either your profile is low again or your ISP is suffering some pretty bad congestion.

Cottage_Economy

Thanks closed and kwikbreaks.

closed - Yes I'm wireless. Sometimes when I'm surfing I get hit with a 'page not found' message (both new and known websites regularly visited by me like this one) and that's how I know I've been disconnected. Simply selecting my network to join from the normal drop down list on the Firefox ribbon doesn't often work. I end up going through the network diagnostics page and then putting in the password for the network when prompted to do so.

By the way, I thought maybe it was my laptop being a bit old and rubbish, but hubby has his laptop up and running (11month old Dell that was scanned and cleaned for nasties and malware at the weekend) and he is experiencing the same issues and same speeds. Appreciate we do share bandwidth sometimes, but generally neither of us is doing anything intensive at the same time. Yesterday I wasn't on the computer much in the evening at all as I had paperwork to shuffle upstairs, and I could hear him cursing the speed and the buffering while he was trying to watch a clip on youtube.

If it's ok with you guys I'm going to continue on with his tomorrow? I'm up at 4:30am so I've got to hit the sack.

My eyelids are drooping and the electric blanket is calling

closed

youre mixing up a wireless network issue, with a possible broadband issue. 1st of all, try using a wired ethernet connection