Slowdown

What causes this behaviour, is it congestion or a problem elsewhere?

Basically I've always had a good connection with sky broadband. Always seen over 1mb/s
Now all of a sudden, for the past few days my downloads have been around 100 kb/s top. If I launch a youtube video it buffers the whole way through
If I download something such as itunes it downloads at around 100 kb/s

I have tried 2 spare routers, exactly the same. I have tried changing the wireless channel and even connecting via ethernet.

I have tried all of the testing when I am the only person connected to the router.
My sync speed is still 14mbps in the router with a noise margin always pretty bang on 7db.

Interestingly, if I launch a torrent it goes at 1.4 mb/s no problems

Here are the router stats, obviously nothing wrong here.

Downstream Upstream

Connection Speed
14986 kbps 1101 kbps
Line Attenuation
30.0 dB 18.5 dB
Noise Margin
7.2 dB 8.6 dB

I have this issue on all 5 laptops and 1 macbook. Even with this sync speed my general browsing is depressingly slow

So to summarise: everything is slow, other than torrents which go full wack. I am seeing around 1mbps when doing a general download. Youtube, iplayer etc all buffer

I'm at a loss with this one personally. Probably time to call them?

Multithreaded downloads are they faster than a single download?

Torrents may also be getting data from other Sky users - thus avoiding congested peering links, if that is the case

How do I try a multithreaded download?

Just an update on this, had a resync overnight (this NEVER normally occurs) and it's all back to normal now

I will monitor it closely. Also DLM has been restarted on the line for some reason - I'm assuming this did the resync.

Download two different files at the same time, or use the feature in http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html

Cheers, it's slowed down once again. Sync hasn't changed. Will do this in a few mins.

Do a speed test from the thinkbroadband web site, what speed do you get?

You should be getting about 12M+ download. I sync at 8000 and get about 7.5M downlaod, so somthing is wrong

Stupidly slow compared to the sync.

Edit. Never had great results from this tester though. I'm getting 500 kb/s on a standard download.

If I launch 3 or 4 downloads at the same time I'm getting around 12 mbps

Edited by ukhardy07 (Mon 06-Feb-12 19:16:58)

If you are the only one seeing it, tempted to say something odd with router/computer (you are using ethernet rather than wireless?)

Same on 5 computers, iPhone, iPad, MacBook pro
All tested when only one device is connected
Have already tried several different routers. No difference

Ethernet was used to test for speedtest above