Ok, first thing. Does your Sky box go thru a filter too. It needs to if it doesn't, If it is, then some investigation into the cabling needed to find out why it has such a drastic effect on your SNR.

Next you need to get your sync speed as close to 8192 as possible and then call PN and ask them to retrain your profile which will lift your 2000 BRAS profile up towards your sync speed. Then you will get circa 7meg rather than two..

The Sky+ box goes directly to the BT socket on the wall of the other room. I don't know what it's called that's attached to the front of the BT socket, but it's got two little sockets, one for the cable that has the filter on the other end that my router is plugged in to, and the other is for the cable that goes to a small little finger-length adaptor that then hooks up to the Sky+ box. This is the way it's been since July and i've not had a problem like this, nothing at all like this.

I'm syncing at 8292 steadily now. Will phoning them up give me better than 130kbps download speeds?

edit - maybe a bit of a daft idea, but could it be that the exchange became overloaded? New Years Day has to have some of the highest traffic of the year what with everyone being home, nothing to do, no shops open etc, and throw into that i've read my exchange (Chorley) has suffered from being too full... i.e. there was a time earlier in the year around summer that they weren't accepting any new people because it was full.

Edited by fetler (Tue 01-Jan-08 20:08:15)

In reply to:

---

Will phoning them up give me better than 130kbps download speeds?

---

No. The problem isn't with Plusnet, and niether is the remedy.

If you type your details into the BT Speedtester, even if it doesn't run it will say "Your IP Profile for this test is ****" What is the figure at present?.

It seems the 'system' is perpetually busy. When it's not it just says some crapp about the IP and my phone number.

Is it always this useless? I'm on a BT line.

I recently sorted a friends Sky+ box connection. The Sky Engineer decided to connect the sky box directly to a two way phone adapter, plug the adapter into the phone socket and plug the ADSL Filter into the spare adapter socket.

Hazaa results!

The speed test has completed on test server speedtester1.nat.bt.com for user *********** and you have downloaded a 1.7Mb file at a speed of

97 kilo bits per second (Kbps), your service bandwidth will have been quoted to you in kilo bits per second.

Your IP address is ************, your browser is reported as being Mozilla 5.0 and is running on Macintosh PPC Mac OS X.

BT would regard the speed ranges shown below as normal service:

For 250kbps End Users speeds between 50 - 250kbps.
For 500kbps End Users speeds between 100 - 500kbps.
For 1000kbps End Users speeds between 200 - 1000kbps.
For 2000kbps End Users speeds between 400 - 2000kbps.

You may now disconnect from the speed test account (click 'disconnect' in your internet connection window) and if you wish to regain normal access to the internet please re-connect to your ISP using your usual username and password.

Please note that test results may vary according to varying traffic in the network. If you continue to experience slower throughput when logged in to your ISP, this may be due to a slow internet site or high traffic levels beyond the BT Wholesale Network. Please report this situation to your ISP's helpdesk.



That help?

edit - i've just had a look at the Nildram exchange checker (found it in Google) and it says "Congestion status on this exchange is RED", and that it was supposed to have been upgraded weeks ago.

Edited by fetler (Tue 01-Jan-08 20:53:43)

I've tried it a few times tonight and got the busy message as well
What happens is if, as I suspect, your router has lost connection to the exchange a few times the BT equipment at the exchange lowers whats called the IP Profile for your line. Basically this means it lowers your download speeds in an effort to stabilise your connection.

Providing your connection is stable for anything from 3 to ten days, the BT gear will raise the Profile in steps until it reaches the max 7150mbps, or the max your line can cope with. This number is totally different to your router sync speed of 8128 so don't confuse the two.

I would suspect that the figure you are seing on the PN site is your current IP Profile as supplied to Plusnet by BT. Plusnet have no control over the time it takes to recover. However it may be worth raising a ticket to make PN aware of the problem.

Cheers, i'll see how it's doing tomorrow just in case by some fluke it fixes itself. I'm mighty annoyed though because i've hundreds of megs of updates to do on my Mac.

Did you use http://test.speedtester.bt.com:50301/

It should give a result like this;

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
IP profile for your line is - 7150 kbps
DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM) 8128 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 6704 kbps

TEST ERROR
The IP address discovered on the network associated with your telephone number:***********

Whatever that means. Why is it whenever I use this speedchecker it's always broken?