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On Sat, 31 Dec 2011, Neil Winchurst wrote:
My local telephone exchange has upgraded to ADSL2+ recently and I have arranged with my broadband provider to upgrade me, which he has done. I have seen a small increase in the download rate, but not a lot.
What was your speed before the upgrade? Typically if it was 4Mb/sec or less, then the increase really isn't going to be much at all. (but reading below suggests this isn't the issue)
Now, I know that there are speed losses by the time it all reaches my computer but ....
Shouldn't be any in your own network...
This morning I checked my router stats which claim that it is downloading to me at a rate of 17 Mbps. I then ran speedchecker.org which reported a download speed of 9.5 Mbps. Now, 5pm, I have checked again and the router still shows the same speed but speedchecker reports a rate of 2.6 Mbps. (It is always slower at this time of day.)
You have a sub optimal ISP.Also, speedcheckers do vary somewhat. They can get busy themselves. And if it's running in Java or Flash in your PC, that could be slowed down again by other stuff running.
The best way I've found is to grab a file via wget off a server, so if you have a hosted website, then stick up a 10MB file and wget it...
$ wget -O/dev/null wirble.drogon.net/bigfile HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 10485760 (10M) [text/plain] Saving to: `/dev/null' 100%[======================================>] 10,485,760 715K/s in 14s 2011-12-31 17:38:43 (710 KB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [10485760/10485760] Bit slow tonight (Line is 8Mb)
As I said, I know that there are losses en route, but this seems excessive. Or am I expecting too much?
It depends on your ISP.
I have checked and my phone is about 730 metres from the exchange, so that is not far. If it is relevant, my router is a Netgear DG834g. I do have the router connected to an extension upstairs, not to the main socket. There are two reasons for this, one is that the main socket is situated just inside the front door, in the little entrance hall. I can hardly set up my desk etc there. The second reason is that I want to have the computer set up upstairs. And I do have filters on the main socket and the extension.
You might sync a shade faster if you put a filtered faceplate on the main master socket and run cat-5 from there, however 17Mb/sec from a max. of 24 isn't too bad.
Yes, I know that for some people a rate of 9.5 Mbps would be great. Still, I am wondering if there is anything that I should be checking, and possibly improving, or should I must accept it as the best that I can expect?
You probably have a sub-optimal ISP.It's as simple as that. They are not all equal and you get what you're paying for. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Heres how it works... You have some copper between you and the exchange. Your modem will negotiate with the modem in the exchange to set the basic line rate. This is the theoretical fastest that your line will go.
Behind that is the BRAS profile - this is a speed set by the exchange equipment - it's usually slightly slower than the max. line speed set by the modems. (Although I think BT are doing away with it on ADSL2+ lines). Very occasionally the BRAS profile can get stuck - it's happened to me twice. Takes a lot of hassle to get it fixed... I don't think that's happened in your case.
Behind this is the BT Wholesale network. Now, on the whole, this network is usually good and fast - however BT only give resellers 2 choices over their network - standard (which you're probably on) and elevated. (this was the old 50:1 and 20:1). Standard says something like you'll get a guaranteed speed of 2Mb/sec over the BT Wholesale network for 90% of the peak time. (Elevated is 3Mb/sec) However, for the most-part BT exceeds this by a big margin.
(There is a slim possibility that the exchange itself is capacity limited, but I don't know how to check this - you're looking fof a VC capacity problem, but how to find it is anyones guess)
Going further back, there is the connection from the BTW network to your ISPs network - and this is where big bottlenecks can happen. If your ISP has not bought enough capacity here from BT then there will be congestion and it will be worse at peak times.
Behind that is the ISPs own network. If they have 2Gb worth of agragated traffic from subscribers but are only running a 1Gb network there there is more congestion.
Some ISPs offer their customers better/poorer service - e.g. business grade and so on - sometimes they give the people paying more a biger bite of their network - sometimes it's the same speeds but more data - read the small print. Remember any contention set by the ISP is on-top of that over the BT Wholesale network.
Then (finally!) there is the points where the ISP hands the data off to other ISPs - via peering points such as the LINX, LoNAP and MaNAP, as well a buying private connections to (e.g.) BBC, ITV, etc. and also buying "transit" from other ISPs - how they connect to the people they can't otherwise conned to via the peering points and directly.
My guess is that your ISP isn't buying enough capacity from BT and/or they don't have enough internal capacity to support their subscribers.
It all costs lots and lots of money for the ISPs to maintain this, and BT charges by the byte for data over their network, so it's a huge balancing act and I'm not surprised when I hear tales of people going slow. It's really hard to get the customer level to enable you to buy more capacity from BT and to your upstreams. If you want to know what the "real" costs are, look at aaisp's pricing. Their pricing is (AIUI) based on zero contention over their own network and with those they peer with. My connection to Entanet at £25 a month would be closer to £75 a month on AAISPs tarrifs based on the data I pull...
But you can always whinge at your ISP - check forums and see what others are experiencing...
And you can always vote with your wallet. Gordon
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