Why might upload speed be over twice download speed?

I was visiting an elderly couple yesterday evening who moved to a retirement apartment 4 weeks ago. They both have desktop PCs, both running Windows 7. Because of the layout of the apartment I set the the 2 PCs up with wireless dongles to connect to their router. The PCs show 4 or 5 bars signal strength.

I noticed that the internet seemed very slow so ran tbb speed test. Download was 0.2Mbps, upload 0.5Mbps. I though this was strange so logged into their Netgear router to see the stats.

I didn't actually write them down but, rounded & approximately, they were (down / up):
CS: 200-300 / 500-600
LA: 53 / 30
NM: 13 / 6
Sorry, connection speeds are a poor memory

The apartments are fairly new build and there is only 1 telephone socket in the place. The router is connected to that socket via a dangly filter..

I'm trying to understand why download should be so slow compared to upload.

Clearly I need to do more investigation and get actual stats. but some pointers as to possible issues would be helpful.

They have strongly held views, not for any financial reasons, that there should be nothing switched on unless necessary. So, at least one of the PCs is switched off when not needed then switched on for the few minutes they are needed. The router is switched off overnight.

I'm trying to get them to change these saying they are very unwise and are likely to cause problems, and result in more time wasting. Whether I succeed in this only time will tell...

Anyway I'd be grateful for some thoughts as to why D/L is so slow compared to U/L.

Because the target noise margin of 13dB is costing them all the speed.

Restart modem and check it connects at same speed and with same margins and if that is the case chase provider to get target noise margin reset.

Switching off/on overnight can mean the router ends up with a low speed connection sometimes and/or automated systems see their line as unstable those slow them down.

Thank you. I had suggested they restart the router this morning, I'll see if they have and try to see what the margins are.

Did you check if the phone line was clear?

In line with what Mr Saffron has said.
i had similar and line had been banded
If BT Line try http://speedtest.btwholesale.com/. 2 tests Line Test and further diagnostics

It's a BT voice line, Eclipse is the ISP.

They should be syncing at about 4 Meg. The reason you are not is that your ISP has put you on a banded profile, the lowest of these Banded Profiles. You need to call them to remove any banding.

[Replying to the last post for convenience]

I thought it worth while updating this as I was able to get over this morning to investigate during daylight hours and the working day.

Firstly an apology. In my original email I gave the router stats from memory and gave the download Noise Margin as 13dB; in fact it was 6.0dB.

Anyway, this morning I connected my laptop via ethernet cable to avoid any wifi vagaries.

Running the TBB speedtest gave me 0.2Mbps download, 0.6Mbps upload. The router stats were (Down/Up)

Connection speed: 285kbps / 880kbps
Line attenuation: 51.0dB / 29.3dB
Noise Margin: 7.3dB / 6.5dB

I rebooted the router - no significance difference for the router stats; the TBB speedtest gave 0.2 D/L, 0.5 U/L, again no significant change.

Having armed myseff with al the relevant passwords, account details, etc. I rang Eclipse and within 3 minutes was through to Steve in Tech.Support. Talked it through with him and after he'd looked at the line and done some tests said that it was banded with an upper limit of 288 kbps. He put a request in to BT to unband the line and also to take it down from ADSL2+. He said that it might be a few minutes to be actioned or up to a couple of hours. If nothing had happened within 3 hours to get back to him. Total call time was less than 9 minutes.

I kept the router Statistics page open and within perhaps 10 minutes it froze. Checking the Status page it had disconnected, either coincidence or the changes were happening. After another 2 or 3 minutes it reconnected. The router stats now were:

Connection speed: 2136kbps / 826kbps
Line attenuation: 49.6dB / 29.3dB
Noise Margin: 8.6dB / 6.3dB

So connection speed 7.5 times faster .

TBB Speedtest results 1.8Mbps D/L / 0.6Mbps U/L. A ninefold improvement. Ran some more tests both wired and wireless and no significant difference.

Trying both their PCs the browsing experience was incomparable, as an example I went to the BBC web site and clicked a video news story, it ran fine with no delays.

As you can imagine they are a very happy pair of silver surfers.

My thanks to all here who gave me such helpful advice. And I must give Eclipse their due, Steve was excellent, easy to talk to, quickly saw the issue, and got it sorted within minutes; full marks to them.

Thanks to all

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

said that it was banded with an upper limit of 288 kbps.

Exactly !

Did he explain why it was and why it hadn't unbanded itself?

He implied that it was fixed rather than subject to auto-banding - unless it was a function of ADSL2+ being applied to a long line. I seem to recall there being comments in various threads on TBB about that resulting in poorer performance.

Other than that he made no comment and I didn't ask. It would have been of curiosity value only. My objective was to get the couple a decent speed for their usage.