Broadband speed halved

Hello all,

For the past few days my 1 Mb broadband connection has only been working at half speed. Speedtest.net gives me the following results:

Download - 0.43 Mb/s
Upload - 0.56 Mb/s
Ping - 95ms

I am with Pipex Homecall and my Wireless router is an Edimax AR-7084gA which lists the following speeds:

SNR Margin db - 15.8 download / 8.0 Upload
Line Attenuation db - 59.0 Download / 33.3 Upload
Data Rate kbps - 512 Download / 682 Upload

Around midnight last night I was unable to access the web at all, as my router was reporting that the virtual circuit was disconnected - although this was working again when I got up this morning.

Does anyone have any advise or suggestions about what I should do? I don't have a BT master socket so I can't try that.

Thanks!

There was an outage yesterday (and on Friday of last week) which has been causing some connections to suffer.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/4453-north-west-b...

What exchange are you on please?

Edited...just spotted that you're on wireless. Not sure if the outage affected wireless at all.

Edited by camieabz (Thu 04-Nov-10 20:07:11)

Hi camieabz, I'm on the Lowestoft exchange. It did start playing up last Friday come to think of it, I live down in Suffolk though so I don't know if I would be effected by this outage.

My router has wireless, but it's connected to my PC via cable. Sorry for the confusion!

Disconnect and reconnect your router. You may be able to do this through the user interface (GUI), but if you can't see how then the easiest thing to do is switch it off for a couple of minutes then on again.

With luck it will reconnect at a much higher connection speed, but depending on your ISP and package (which are?) it may give an immediate improvement in actual speed or it may take a couple of days (up to five ).

If it doesn't connect at a higher speed we need to look deeper into it.

If it does connect a lot faster, then do the same again after 11am tomorrow but before 3pm. That would give a bit more.

Hello, RobertoS

I've tried switching off my router for 20 minutes a few times since last Friday when this started but I have so far seen no improvement.

Browsing through a local community forum just now I saw that someone else was having a similar problem and they have been told by BT that there is a problem in the area, so maybe the problem isn't at my end.

Should I just sit tight for a few days?

Yuk!

Repeatedly reconnecting can cause the system to think your line is unstable and slow it down even more. This may have happened to you already .

Do a single reconnection in the morning between the times I said, and read the stats, (connection speed, attenuation and noise margin), immediately before and after. Please post both.

Then we will have a fuller picture of the current state of things.

Importantly, which ISP and package are you on?

My ISP is Pipex Homecall. I will do as you suggest and report the results tomorrow, thanks for the assistance.

I tried reconnecting my router this morning at around 11.30 and got the following results.

Before:

(Download / Upload)
SNR Margin 16.5 / 8.0 db
Line Attenuation 59.0 / 33.3 db
Data Rate 512 / 682 kbps

After:

SNR Margin 17.4 / 8.0 db
Line Attenuation 58.0 / 33.3 db
Data Rate 512 / 676 kbps

That looks as though your connection has been altered by Pipex (= Tiscali = TalkTalk) to a fixed 512kbps instead of 1024kbps. You need to contact support.

How much do you pay per month, and is your phone with Pipex as well? What exchange is it?

You may be able to get better deals these days, though not much more than the 1Mbps.

Thanks for the help, I will try calling them in the morning and see what they say.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

How much do you pay per month, and is your phone with Pipex as well? What exchange is it?

My phone is with BT and I am on the Lowestoft exchange. I pay £24 a month for my broadband - I've been meaning to move to a cheaper ISP for ages but never gotten around to it, so maybe this will give me the incentive to finally migrate