Scottish Elises

Wonder if any of you IT wizards can help me before I call BT. I've notice my connection speed has become ridiculously slow the last couple of days, its like being back to dial-up again. I've been with BT for about 4yrs, never upgraded it and its a 1 meg connection. The modem is a BT voyager 105 and I don’t have a wireless setup.

I've run the BT Broadband Desktop help software and carried out connection speed tests. The first one I did came up 0.171mps, so I restarted the computer and tried again, that was 0.26mps. I then disconnected the modem, left it disconnected for a couple of minutes and tried again, that was 0.17mps. I tried the connection test and that said no faults were found with the line. I've also deleted all the internet temp and history files, that’s made no difference.

Cant think of anything else to try. Any ideas

its funny you say that, i have been experiencing the same for about a week now - im with BT as well.

Good luck phoning up BT and getting any sense from them!

have you tried running a spyware program?? try spybot

Me too

r055 wrote:Good luck phoning up BT and getting any sense from them!

Yeah thats what I'm trying to avoid, had enough hassle cancelling my dial-up when I got broadband, that took 2 and a half hrs on the phone. If I cant sort it tonight, looks like i'll have to tomorrow, it's driving me nuts.

mckeann wrote:have you tried running a spyware program?? try spybot

Well I've done a full anti-virus scan, nothing found either. I'll TRY and download spybot, it'll probably take a week though .

Mine (AOL) has been going slow this past week too. Sometimes takes an age for a page to load

You need to see what speeds you are trained at first - deep down in the modem software (it's a USB modem I think?) there should be a diagnostic or utility program that shows the physical connection speed. This speed will be the absolute maximum data transfer you can establish. TBH, <512kbit/s = 0.5mbit/s is unlikely.

After that you need to see whether there is traffic on the link even when you aren't using it - that could be down to spyware/virus type of s/w on your machine or just some sort of denial of service attack from the outside.

To do this from windows you ought to be able to get up the status window for the interface (right mouse button on the little computer in the system tray near the clock, then status). This has a count of sent and received packets.

If you close down all programs and just watch it, see what happens. Then run your web browser, go to http://www.google.co.uk (all static content so no dynamic refreshes) and see whether the traffic continues after initial page fetching.

If all is well then you actually may have an upstream problem.

Try the adslguide.org.uk (thinkbroadband.com these days) speed test and see what answers you get. If they're about right, there's nothing wrong with your connection and the problem lies further into BT somewhere.

Also worth trying something like
start->run...
cmd<enter>

In the black command window that pops up try:

tracert news.bbc.co.uk

Then cut and paste the results and post them back here.

Cheers,
Robin

P.S. If you're used to running various peer-to-peer "sharing" programs you might find that your ISP has enforced some traffic shaping on your link - make sure you turn all those programs off for a week and see if it gets any better.

Me too (BT) - slower, but nothing like as bad as yours Kev.

I do have more neighbours with WiFi routers now - is everyone just playing live games on their XBOXes ?

BT are starting to roll out 8Mbps... wonder if it's anything to do with that??

I've registered, so hopefully I'll get an upgrade soon.

Maybe Orange Broadband isn't so bad after all No problems with loss of speed here.

Thanks Robin

Well I found the software for the modem, checked the status, which is:
Rx data Rate : 1152kbps
Tx Data Rate: 288kbps
I then ran a diagnostic check, which it fails on system test. That comes up with probable causes, the line, modem, microfilter and/or driver. So I then went and updated the modem driver, which there was an updated one. Tried the test again and got 0.128mps.

I then went to thinkbroadband.com eventually and carried out a test, that was 0.9mps . That’s the kind of speed I expect. So I'm assuming that the line and modem is ok, but the problem lies with BT.

I do have peer to peer software installed, but haven't used it for about 6 or so months.

I haven't checked the traffic on the line yet, but I carried out the other test, which the results are below:

C:\Documents and Settings\Compaq_Owner>tracert news.bbc.co.uk

Tracing route to newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.226.29]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 11 ms 12 ms 11 ms esr1.edinburgh5.broadband.bt.net [217.32.78.140]

2 12 ms 12 ms 12 ms 217.32.78.13
3 12 ms 15 ms 14 ms 217.41.218.1
4 14 ms 13 ms 13 ms 217.41.174.66
5 14 ms 12 ms 12 ms 217.41.218.74
6 13 ms 12 ms 12 ms 217.41.174.46
7 12 ms 13 ms 12 ms 217.47.95.114
8 13 ms 12 ms 13 ms core1-pos15-1.edinburgh.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.199.
205]
9 21 ms 20 ms 20 ms core1-pos13-0.birmingham.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.201
.25]
10 24 ms 22 ms 23 ms core1-pos5-1.ealing.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.204.218]

11 24 ms 24 ms 25 ms core1-pos1-0-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net [62.6.201
.82]
12 24 ms 23 ms 25 ms 194.74.65.6
13 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms 212.58.238.129
14 26 ms 25 ms 27 ms newslb12.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.226.29]

Trace complete.

How anyone can make sense of that is beyond me.

The answer is as expected for a line of your class.

It shows the round trip time from your machine to each of the routers in the path from your house to the BBC news server farm (a highly reliable, very well connected, set of machines on the internet - always a good reference).

The fact that you get 0.9mbps talking to adslguide speed test, and the round trip times to bbc means that your line is basically OK.

So that begs the question, what are you using to determine your speed is 0.128mbps??

Cheers,
Robin

robin wrote:So that begs the question, what are you using to determine your speed is 0.128mbps??

I've been testing it with BTs own software, its BT Broadband Desktop Help. I'll test it again later on when the net is a bit quieter and see what I get. If its not better I'll try and call BT tomorrow, that'll be my day wiped out .

Thanks for your help Robin, your truly a master of all trades aren't ya

I would be very suspicious of that result in that case.

I wonder if the BT indicated result is in BYTE/s not BIT/s (0.125mbyte/s is the same as 1.0mbit/s) - that would make sense!

Now, as to why your link is slow - what websites are slow - all of them, or just some of them. If you use the tracert trick to each of the websites that is slow, e.g.:

tracert barm.cakes.com

if you see some big numbers in there, or step changes (like the first 10 lines are ~20ms and then you get one that's 200ms) then that is most likely where the issue lies - different ISP's have different peering relationships with one another, and so it's not uncommon to have a bunch of sites that are hard to reach while others in the same country are apparently working fine.

I wouldn't even waste my breath calling BT on this one as they will just tell you to reinstall windows

Robin