How to monitor internet connection speed and availability?

Hello all,
Hoping someone out there could suggest a suitable solution. I'm on a Mac and experiencing very sporadic availability of broadband but Talk Talk are not being very helpful (surprise) and I wanted to gather proof of the patchy broadband connection.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good monitoring tool that will pick up on loss of service and/or drops in bandwidth speed?

Many thanks in advance.
J

Before you go to the trouble it is worth ensuring that any phone extension leads are crackle free. I had a lot of trouble with my ADSL and it turned out to be a bad extension lead.

Hi Giles - I've done this already. And besides - it's an existing set up that's be pretty trouble free for a year. Only started to play up in the last 4 days or so. No changes to the network, lines, routers - nothing.

3 machines on the same network - pc and mac - experiencing the same drop of connection and slow periods of connection. Other times its as fast as it always has been. A speed check on this site shows 6, 4 and 1.4kbps at different times.

I don't know if there is a reason that only web page loads are effected as other services tested - VOIP, streaming and downloading are still recording descent speeds.

Any input appreciated.

That still doesn't mean that the cable from the house to the pole is good?

The cable and connections do corrode. It's best to eliminate all of these before claiming it is the ISP.

Hi again Giles - How am I meant to test lines outside the house? Are you suggesting getting a BT engineer out before I contact the ISP?

Don't do that - you will get a £250 charge if no fault is found (and they will do all they can to avoid sending an engineer, anyway).

Have you tried a quiet line test?

Have you tried the quiet line test (do a Google) if you have any noise on your line then you can complain to the voice carrier and they will get Openreach out to test your lines etc etc.

If you have no noise on the line then you have to go thru the router swapping rigmarole etc via the ISP.

A further point - do you get an increase of noise on the voice line when you power up the router and it sync to the exchange. This is a good indication of faults on the line and is still a voice line issue and should be resolvable without ISP action.

I appreciate all your comments and looked in to them all. Noise line test sounds good to me. Since last posting I've been downloading content and sometimes I'm getting really good rates of transfer and then it drops to Bits per second. So very sporadic coverage I thing, I'm in a pretty rural area and doubt that there is a line hog close by but I admit I don't fully understand how the sharing of bandwidth works. It could be that, the line, the exchange or the ISP. How is one to know?

Again, you are all great and I appreciate any attention my confusion can attract.

The changing filters etc is the usual excuse that any ISP may quote you do, and occasionaly that IS the cause. Seriously!

I had one filter in for years, and swapped it with the shiny bonding routers filters. Speeds were 'ok' at the start, and eventually went doen hill. *I didn't need to blinking change cables etc, I know what I'm doing, and done it a million times for flips sake. I am not StuPid

The very friendly Be* guy asked me IF I would just give it a go to see what happened. I eventually went over and changed it. and I thought, is there any other excuses to hit me with? Never mind.
So I logged back into my BeBox and the speeds were back up to 18meg down, and 1.4meg up. WRONG thinks me, it should be my BETTER DGN2000 that gets the speeds up to that speed? - WAHOO!! Going to wire it up tomorrow to see if it goes up higher before any tweaks. Will just see how it runs with the Netgear for a while, and at least the BeBox can be >dare-say-it< RELIED UPON!

If in doubt mate, try everything - just do it one simple bit at a time. Take your time with it, and it's done right.

Asking here is always wise too. You always get knowledgable people in here who are always willing to help when they can.

Another tip: Make sure that every phone socket in your house has a filter on it.