Help with terrible download speeds

Hi, hope someone can help me with this, I work from home and need a reasonable connection to do my job.

A couple of months ago I started getting very frequent disconnects from the internet, lasting only a couple of minutes but dozens and dozens of times per day. But, the speed was totally acceptable, about 4MB download which was fine for what I needed.

I called BT broadband help and after trying the usual things, master socket, new microfilters, ethernet cable instead of wireless etc etc they said they would do something at the exchange to try and fix it (i have no idea what they did, i just know it didnt involve someone coming to my house)

That seems to have fixed the disconnects, only getting 1-2 per day now but the speed has dropped so the connection is no longer usable for work, it takes minutes just to load a webpage sometimes... in a speedtest I am getting about 0.1mb download but strangely my upload speed is still totally fine at 0.9 mb. Think it was about that before but wouldnt swear it...

Checking my line stats I see something which looks quite alarming:

Noise margin (Down/Up) 8.7 dB / 6.0 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 50.8 dB / 28.6 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 7.8 dBm / 1.6 dBm

Surely this line attenuation is ridiculously high but the speed was absolutely fine from January until last week so I dont see how their can suddenly be a fault on the line. Whatever they did on the exchange seems to have messed things up.

Anyone got a suggestion for how to fix this, or is there someone from bt on the forum who can help??

Nothing alarming about those stats - unless you live next door to the exchange. And 4Mb is broadly in line with the attenuation.

What are the full stats including sync speed?

What does the BT speedtester report? http://speedtest.btcentralplus.com/

Download speedachieved during the test was - 1168 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 2000-7150 Kbps.
IP Profile for your line is - 4551 Kbps


This test was not conclusive and further testing is required.This might be useful for your ISP to investigate the fault.

Note: An Upstream test was not conducted on this line due to a technical issue. If your concern is related to upstream performance then please retry
the performance test again in 1 hours time.

Im not sure what a sync speed is, here is everything from that tab on the homehub advanced settings page:

Line state Connected
Connection time 0 days, 01:03:50
Downstream 5,379 Kbps
Upstream 1,067 Kbps

ADSL Settings
VPI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation G.992.5 Annex A
Latency type Fast
Noise margin (Down/Up) 8.5 dB / 6.2 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 50.8 dB / 28.6 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 7.9 dBm / 1.6 dBm
Loss of Framing (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
Loss of Signal (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
Loss of Power (Local/Remote) 0 / 0
FEC Errors (Down/Up) 0 / 0
CRC Errors (Down/Up) 15635 / 0
HEC Errors (Down/Up) 142348 / 0
Error Seconds (Local/Remote) 2080 / 0

Edited by MWraith (Fri 07-Oct-11 13:21:50)

The sync speeds are there:

Downstream 5,379 Kbps
Upstream 1,067 Kbps

Those are reasonable ... at a guess you are maybe 5km from the exchange by road?

The error figures are extremely high for the 1 hour connection time ... First thing to try is a reboot of the modem, but not a quick off/on.

Power down teh modem/hub and then disconnect the 'phone cable and PC. Leave it powered down for 15 to 20 minutes - allows it to completely cool down, and any session at the exchange will be killed. Then reboot your PC by going through a full shut down and power up.

Restart the modem/hub and allow it to fully boot, say 3 minutes. Connect the PC, and finally connect the phone cable, allow it to sync and then get teh stats again, repeat that at 2 and 4 minutes.

Put the first set here, and add the last 4 lines showing the number of errors from the next two. Then try a BT speedtest and grab the stats again afterwards - what are te erro figures then?

Errors might be due to running in ADSL2+ mode, dropping to ADSL2 or ADSL might be part of a solution.

As for 1Meg throughput from a higher IP Profile, possibly nothing to do with the line, and more to do with network from exchange to where the test server and internet is.

May well be, but a nice cold, clean reboot can (almost) eliminate the modem side.

In the original post the OP said about pages taking a long time to load too.

In reply to a post by MWraith:

Downstream 5,379 Kbps

= Sync/Connection Speed!

Router stats are mostly good, but Output Power readings are low (would expect about 20 Down/ 10 Up).

Throughput of 1168 Kbps is low, prob due to congestion in exchange/network.

I actually tried powering down the router like MHC suggested this morning. It was terribly slow so I turned the router off while I went in the shower and nipped to the shops, so those stats are 'post shutdown'.

I can try it again if you think it will be likely to show something different?

Will changing to ADSL2 or ADSL fix the speed, I just want my 4mb/s back that I've had for 9 months until last weekend

In reply to a post by MHC:

May well be, but a nice cold, clean reboot can (almost) eliminate the modem side.

In the original post the OP said about pages taking a long time to load too.

Yes, the speed is *Slow*

I'm not complaining just because a speedtest says its slow, I ran the speedtest because I could barely do anything on the internet anymore.

But I already rebooted the BT Home Hub like you suggested

I doubt they will fix the speed.

To be honest looks like exchange or ISP network congestion, slow web browsing if download of files feel faster points at the ISP DNS servers being slow, you can specify any open DNS server, you are not tied to using your providers.