see if the 4000 is still 4000 when the speedtest drops low.

I'm with you on this one. I've been watching me performance degrade over the last few months. I'm just finished with the live chat people who have admitted there is a network problem and "someone" will contact me when there is a change made to the line. The last time this happened I was never contacted but the performance did seem to get better. I'm keeping my fingers crossed they will actually do something.

The problem is one of capacity. I have it on fairly good authority that it's a lack of 'headroom' on the BT Centrals, mainly due to Demon reducing their purchased capacity on the BT supplied ADSL Max as they migrate customers off to C&W LLU.

Demon only have 155 meg Centrals, and the way these work is that they don't automatically load balance. BT allocate customers to Centrals on a 'round robin' basis not on capacity, so it's quite likely that certain Centrals get more congested, which is why they will get you to disconnect and reconnect. Often you can grab a less utilised Central, or you'll see a temporary improvement as some people disconnect and move across to another Central.

I believe at the moment, Demon have only 4 or 5 Centrals, and I'll wager this will reduce as the next phase of C&W exchange LLU starts to come into effect. In fact, the situation for ADSL Max users should gradually improve as the migration progresses, but the bean-counters at Demon are so keen to reduce their costs, they'll reduce capacity far more than they should, at the expense of their existing customers.

I'm on Business 8000 and paying a premium (quite a significant one) to have better throughput at peak times. However between 10am and 6pm, my latency averages no better than 90ms (usually about 20ms), my packet loss goes up to over 1% and my downline throughput drops from about 5.8 meg to below 2.

Roll on April when my exchange goes LLU, and if that doesn't improve things, I'm off to Be/O2

My Demon ADSL stats

Post deleted by billford

any interest to declare ?

Post deleted by billford

In reply to a post by yarwell:

see if the 4000 is still 4000 when the speedtest drops low.

It's been bad all day today - currently 0.9 mbps. Odd thing is that it was the same last Friday, unless that's pure coincidence. Rest of the week fine (2.9) apart from Wednesday morning until about 10.00 and Thursday afternoon/evening.

Router now showing:

Data rate(Kbps)
3872Kb 448Kb

Is this of significance?

Edited by docn (Fri 25-Feb-11 16:37:20)

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the downstream speed has dropped a tad on the router but not enough to account for what you're seeing. speedtester.bt.com will show up your IP profile which is worth a quick check.

The other thing to try is to disconnect / reconnect from the router web interface as you may get on a less congested pipe - has worked for me and others a few times.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

the downstream speed has dropped a tad on the router but not enough to account for what you're seeing. speedtester.bt.com will show up your IP profile which is worth a quick check.

The other thing to try is to disconnect / reconnect from the router web interface as you may get on a less congested pipe - has worked for me and others a few times.

Thanks for the advice. Funnily enough, I did disconnect a couple of hours back and now it's back to 2.9 again. That doesn't usually work for me, though - I've tried it a few times before.

Speedtester shows:

Download speedachieved during the test was - 2480 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :3776 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 3000 Kbps

Router now shows:

Data rate(Kbps)
3776Kb 448Kb

Not at all sure what all this means - except that Demon is perfectly capable of providing a consistent 2.9 mbps or thereabouts, but frequently fails to - and for a day or so at a time.

I'd switch tomorrow, were it not for the fact that most of the people I know round here are only getting around 1mbps! And that's with BT and various other ISPs. Demon's very poor, but the opposition could be even worse if I switch!