Assistance for a student?

Hi there! I've recently moved into a house share and our landlord has only just provided us with internet a week after moving in (the engineer came and installed the line).

However the service is appalling during the day time and mediocre at night. I'm primarily a gamer and my ping to the usual game I play is around 100-150, and very noticeable. Where I used to live, my ping was around 40-50 which is very acceptable for me and the lag was hardly noticeable.

I was wondering if it is possible to terminate a contract with the ISP so early on (given my landlord agrees), and try a new ISP? Or if it could be another problem (with the exchange maybe?).
It is possible for me to get a fibre contract at this location if I could escape my current one.

I don't have much of an idea what could be happening, but I believe it is down to the ISP.

No point in considering switching ISP until you determine whether issue is with your ISP, line or exchange.

Who is iSP? What exchange?

Please post full router stats?

Are you over WiFi? I've been there myself and found the airways can be very busy on 2.4GHz if you've also got students living next door. I've also found housemates will rarely 'fess up to hammering the connection or don't realise they are (eg. upload on uTorrent )

I think you can get out of contracts within the first couple of weeks otherwise you're reliant on convincing the ISP to release you based on poor service.

Fibre based stuff (FTTC or Cable) is the only reasonable option for a house of students. Standard ADSL won't cope; one person on Skype video chat would kill it off.

You're probably plumb out of luck. The landlord will unlikely want to fight with the ISP to terminate the contract and he won't be at the property to do all the connection diagnosis they'll ask for to even contemplate letting him end the contract without penalty. Most ISP's cancellation period is up until the day before go live, after which there will be a cancellation fee.

Who's the ISP? Is this ADSL, Fibre or Cable?

The ISP is EE and It's ADSL. I suppose I am out of luck, which is a shame because I absolutely love online gaming and it's my go-to in my spare time. I'm on a wired connection to the router and such as well. How do I post router stats? It's just the simple router that they have provided.

Exchange details:

Exchange name: Plymouth
Exchange code: WWPYTH
Location: Plymouth South West
Postcode: PL11BQ
Serves (approx): 25,567 residential premises
2,429 non-residential premises.

Edited by deleted (Sun 05-Oct-14 12:20:54)

I'm not very technical when it comes to routers and ADSL but here are my thoughts.

Your landlord has gone to the trouble of providing you with wired connections rather than leaving you to struggle with wireless, so he may be sympathetic to your problems and help you as much as he can.

You need to see if the problem is with the ADSL connection so you need the router stats. You will need the router login and password to get these. If your landlord doesn't know, they may have been left at the factory defaults.

If you have a good connection, it is possible that you have maxed-out the capacity of the line. If your house-mates won't agree to be responsible with their usage, you might explore whether the router supports bandwidth limiting or QoS profiling. However, sharing available bandwidth by enabling such features is likely to please nobody, yourself included.

Finally, since you're a student, if the poor connection will affect your ability to study, your should definitely complain to your landlord, especially if he specialises in letting to students. Otherwise, you could forget about gaming for the time being and concentrate on your studies. There are plenty of other amusements available to you when you are young.

Edit: It is also possible that you have maxed-out the capacity of the router, especially if it is a cheap one. I will leave others to comment on this.

Edited by micksharpe (Sun 05-Oct-14 14:59:09)

Do you pay for broadband through your landlord or was it kind of a bonus of the house?

When I was a student in Manchester our neighbours had Sky ADSL bundled in with their house but in a house of 6 students the 12mbps connection didn't really meet their needs so they got Virgin and paid for that themselves. Yeah it meant they had a little extra expensive (£5 each a month) but they then just treated the sky connection as a backup.

Yeah it is in the inclusive bill I pay to my landlord every term, he pays the company with our money. Can you have two different ISPs for one house? Also 2 of my flat mates aren't gamers, they just use it occasionally, while me and the other one are gamers and use it and would like a good ping.

Virgin actually do a nice student deal for 9 months, but it would only be me who really wants the ping, so they wouldn't pay for it. Well, the other gamer might go halves with me

Edited by deleted (Sun 05-Oct-14 19:02:57)

Please post your full router stats. For a BrightBox: login and go to Advanced Settings/ System/ ADSL Status. Also post 'Time Connected:' from initial Status page. Full router stats are key to any speed issues.