Pitiful rural broadband; now down from 1Mb to 200k

My business partner lives in an old rectory in a dead end road, in the country.

Amazingly he has tolerated a 1Mb download speed for some years.
It has now got seriously bad, dropping to <200k!

He rang Sky, who told him to run netsat that showed up 50 or so entries whereupon the Skyman told him he had too many internet processes running so he should reduce them to get the speed up again.
Sounds like gobbledegook to me and a jolly good way to get rid of a call!

Can anyone please -
1) advise if there is any truth in what he has been told?

2) how can these processes be monitored via software in english, rather than nerdish?


Thanks

Lots of netstat entries is not unusual, the question really is what data was being transferred.

What Sky modem do they have? And what are the connection stats shown in its web interface?

Software like tbbmeter can let you watch your PC is doing, and how much of the connect it is using at any instant, and even which programs are using the small amount of bandwidth available

In reply to a post by 4thinkb:

Can anyone please -
1) advise if there is any truth in what he has been told?

There is a grain of truth but its been completely garbled.

If your friend has by chance been infected by a virus or malware, or is downloading using bittorrent or similar then they might have lots of connections open, and closing them would speed up web browsing/email.

If your friend is a typical user who uses email/web, then a handful of connections shown in netstat is normal and just how the internet works. (e.g. a web browser loading a site such as BBC News can open quite a lot of connections to get all the pictures and text. They are closed after a while).

Your friend needs to check he has the Sky router in the master socket, and preferably has any wired in extensions removed (plugged in is fine if they are AFTER the filter). If that is already the case then check for a broken filter.

Technical information from the Sky router would be useful too.

Post deleted by 4thinkb

Don't want to hijack the thread, but if your friend has access to a Mifi dongle or similar then a 3G (or better) connection could be worth a try instead of fixed line.

I myself was very skeptical, having thought that 3G was for mobile phones only.
Then I tried a Mifi on the Three network at home I got 5 Megs download consistently - I was very impressed as this is identical to my fixed line!
The Mifi is a Huawei E585, and since then the E586 has been released which can go up to 21 Mbps.
I had a Three pay as you go SIM in mine.

It depends on coverage in your friend's area, but if you can borrow one to try then you may find its better than fixed line, and he could switch to 3G.

HTH

Zebs