Hi everyone,

Quick update. Someone contacted me from Orange or EE, following posting on here. I am trying to understand my situation so would appreciate advice on the following.

I have had a few conversations with level 3 i think, complaint resolution, or a label to that effect. And the good news is that progress is being made.

Over the Christmas break i installed an i plate on the bt box, and then later changed this to an asdl filter plate. I removed all wiring bar one telephone. The connection speed improved and the router stats were
6648Kbps 1151 KBPS
LA 25.8dB 14.0dB
NM 21.0dB 6.2dB

My first call with the ISP stated that their were errors showing on the line and that it looked like a fault outside the house with BT. Agreed for a 48 hour monitoring.

My second call with ISP that the monitoring had shown the line could only take 6meg and that the sales person mis informed me of the line capability and that adsl2* was for a business use and a much more expensive product, but fibre had just been installed at my exchange and this could be an option if i wanted to go to a faster connect. I stated that i didnt want to close the complaint ticket. and that i wanted to continue a monitor of the line.

I missed the next update, a voicemail stated that a BT engineer would have to look at the line and that this would happen and then i would be contacted.

At around 1pm today my line speed was the same as what was quoted above.

At around 5pm today my ISP called to ask me to do a btspeedtest http://www.speedtest.btwholesale.com/ This showed a 14mb download speed. I was told that my connection had been banded due to connection issues, and that the line had been reset but they were still showing errors on the line, they told me that it is usually as this point they refer to a bt engineer to solve the problem. I asked to monitor the connection over the weekend to see what the stability of the connection was like.

Current router stats
17392kbps 888kbps
LA 25.5dB 13.8dB
NM 6.0dB 15.5dB


Whilst the download speed is roaring and really what i was after from the beginning, i noticed that the stream speed was woeful, youtube iplayer content stutters stalls etc. I did the iplayer speed test, the download speed is fine but the steaming speeds are poor, some registering 0mbps.
I then carried out a jitter test by speedtest.net and the results are mixed mostly D-F. Prior to the rebanding the 6mbps speed was a consistent A on jitter.

i took screen shots of the router stats over a few days as i sought to improve the connection speeds. Prior to rebanding on WLAN
TxPkts 204203 RxPkts 152044

after rebanding
TxPkts 2649083 RxPkts 1457838

My understanding is that this measures the speed of signal out and return, the higher the number the slower the speed? So this has deteriorated with the rebanding?

So thats all i can think to write at the moment, sorry if i have left something out. Any advise would be great.

Thanks again to everyone for your help so far i have learned a great deal, though i still feel clueless to the situation.

Andrew.

Your understanding of TX and RX packets is wrong
This is just a counter of how many data packets holding data you sent and received, nothing to do with line quality.

Some providers may be having congestion due to people being home due to snow - so good pings may be difficult today.

It is possible running the line at 6dB target margin is creating errors, but once dark you would expect to see the downstream noise margin dip to under 3dB if that were the case.

Excuse me if I chuckle, but 11 months to get to this stage is quite unusual. At least you have got there!

You've done the right thing by asking them to monitor over the weekend. In my opinion you would do a very wrong thing if you let anyone there talk you into their fibre product, at least at this stage. Particularly in view of what preceded the suggestion. (I come to that in a moment).

I assume now your 12-month contract has expired that you are on normal monthly terms?

These stats:-

Current router stats
17392kbps 888kbps
LA 25.5dB 13.8dB
NM 6.0dB 15.5dB

are perfect. At the top end of what is achievable with your downstream attenuation, which is a relatively fixed item. You should have had these long ago. It rather looks as though you have been moved from their old LLU kit to a BT Wholesale service, with the upload capped due to interleaving.

My second call with ISP that the monitoring had shown the line could only take 6meg

Possibly based on historic data but a wrong conclusion from that data. Indicative of a correctable problem.

... and that the sales person mis informed me of the line capability and that adsl2* was for a business use and a much more expensive product

That is so incredibly wrong it can't even be a lie.

When you read the stats, are you getting these from the router GUI or by using telnet? You have given us the TxPkts, which implies telnet.

If so, you have the current error stats in there as well. Is there any chance you could upload a screenshot taken now or tomorrow to somewhere and give us a link?

Re the RxPkts and TxPkts, those are just counts of data packets transferred I'm afraid. All data is split into packets to send to you, and taken out of them by your router to make a pure data stream. Think of a 20-page document being posted to you by snailmail, one page per envelope, and someone taking them out of the envelopes and sorting them into the right order for you to read. Rx are Received, Tx are Transmitted from you.

I think you will find that if you run similar tests during Mon-Fri daytime you will find they all run smoothly with little jitter. Saturday and Sunday I don't know, with more people at home and sports on. It could very well be pure congestion on the Orange/EE service caused by lack of adequate provision for a decent service.

Hi there,

Thanks for the responses. I took the stats from the router.
I am not surprised i got that wrong, sorry still learning, all this is quite a lot to get my head around.
I have tested again, getting more B's on the ping test, maybe its settling down a bit? No disconnections logged on the router either so that is a positive too.

I did a google search for jitter problems and came across a test from Berkley?
The summary of noteworthy events were
-certain TCP protocols are blocked in outbound traffic
-Not all DNS types were correctly processed
-Your computers clock is slightly fast

The clock was out by 6 seconds, most of the protocols were highlighted in a more detailed report as being anti malware systems put in place by the ISP. There was one error that was of interest
-The resolver at 192.168.0.1 could not process the following tested types:
-Medium (~1300B) TXT records
-Large (~3000B) TXT records
-Large (~3000B) TXT records fetched with EDNS0
It does not validate DNSSEC. It does not wildcard NXDOMAIN errors

Now i will come straight out with it, i have no idea what that means. I know from Google that DNSSEC is a standard type for security protocol handshaking, or something like that. Google also showed a number of results of netgear products having issues with DNSSEC but i take those with a pinch of salt, i would have thought firmware updates would take care of any such issues?

So i am not really sure, would the above report concern anyone. Do i need a better router?

Thanks again for all your help.

Andrew.

In reply to a post by dosfbb:

I did a google search for jitter problems and came across a test from Berkley?

Linky please?

Heres the link: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

I can't say I understand them much.

My Summary from that interesting tester were:

Summary of Noteworthy Events
Minor Aberrations
Certain TCP protocols are blocked in outbound traffic (OK, expected mainly from Port 25 Out blocked by ISP)
Network packet buffering may be excessive (Uplink 3000 ms, Downlink is good) (Not bothered)
Your DNS resolver returns IP addresses for names that do not exist (Just cuz I use OpenDNS)

I got none of those "TXT records" things but did get

It does not validate DNSSEC. It does not wildcard NXDOMAIN errors.

so don't worry about those.

In reply to a post by dosfbb:

most of the protocols were highlighted in a more detailed report as being anti malware systems put in place by the ISP

What do you mean by that? "This is probably for security reasons, as this protocol is generally not designed for use outside the local network."?

EDIT: All this has nowt to do with your particular router.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 20-Jan-13 14:24:50)

It said,
-Direct TCP access to remote SMTP servers (port 25) is prohibited. This means you cannot send email via SMTP to arbitrary servers. Such blocking is a common counter measures against malware.......etc.

Others in the report were
-Direct TCP access to remote RPC servers (port 135) is blocked
(port 139) is blocked
(port 445) is blocked
Reason for all three
-This is probably for security reasons, as this protocol is generally not designed for use outside the local network.


Can i ask what router do you use? I have the dgn1000 N150. The wireless perfomrance is bad and i would like a better one. My old DG834G had excellent wifi. Something common on google are old users of DG834's criticising the more modern network products for wifi performance. Even the R6300 has some reports of poor wireless.

I have done a few more ping tests, mixed bag more D's are slipping in to the results now. It seems to fluctuate at all times of the day, i guess traffic rather than interference may be the cause. The main issue is streaming on you tube it seems to hang on the buffer then the video catches up to the download and wont move on. Dont know if that makes sense or not?
BBC iplayer on hidef streamed to a setbox whilst being able to browse the net was the main priority and i have that now. Internet gaming is not a big thing for me.
Would i be right in thinking its a balance between speed and stability, you cant have both? And that marketing is based on speed because that is something as consumers we recognise and prioritise as being the most important thing?


Router stats today are
17392kbps 888kbps
LA 25.5DB 13.8DB
NM 6.2DB 15.4DB

All those blocked ports are OK.

I have an Orange BrightBox with 2 x Netgear DG834GT for backup. All are good; I only use G wireless. The Netgear DGN1000 does not have good reports.
EDIT: You ought to persuade Orange to send you a BrightBox.

In reply to a post by dosfbb:

Would i be right in thinking its a balance between speed and stability, you cant have both?

There is a balance; the more stable the less speed, but you can have a stable fast connection. The DLM always attempts for a stable line at the expense of speed.

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 20-Jan-13 14:39:36)

In reply to a post by dosfbb:

-The resolver at 192.168.0.1 could not process the following tested types:
-Medium (~1300B) TXT records
-Large (~3000B) TXT records
-Large (~3000B) TXT records fetched with EDNS0
It does not validate DNSSEC. It does not wildcard NXDOMAIN errors

These are all to do with the DNS server running on your router, though they could be revealing issues with the DNS servers configured on your router.

The three types of message that cannot be processed indicate that the handling of large DNS entries is broken - possibly because of a failure to implement DNS lookups over TCP (most DNS lookups use UDP). In practice, you will not notice any consequences of these problems, though make sure any firewall rules allowing UDP port 53 similarly allow TCP port 53.


DNSSEC is not commonly used yet and few name servers implement the DNSSEC extensions. My router supports DNSSEC - but is a rack mount server running the Unbound DNS Server under pfSense, configured to handle DNSSEC and to look up from authoritative servers (as none of the DNS servers I have access to - Zen's, my hosting provider's and Google's - supports DNSSEC).

Consumer routers will likely struggle with the cryptographic requirements of DNSSEC - I remember reading of an attempt to implement DNSSEC on Android which worked but left DNS lookups unbearably slow on an average smart phone.


Not wildcarding NXDOMAIN is, I would argue, correct behaviour - it means that an expected DNS lookup failure is correctly returned to your computer as a failure rather than being redirected elsewhere.