Stuttering Broadband - Anyone Offer Advice. ?

For a while now i have been noticing my broadband seems to be suffering some issues, i have run a full scan with Avira Premium and Malware Bytes and there does not appear to be any malware on the system, i stopped using the Firefox browser as i thought maybe it was the cause as in the past it has consumed much memory, i am now using Google Chrome and getting the same issues, my computer is using Windows 7 and is fully up to date with the latest Windows updates and it has 4 Gigabyte of memory.

The issues are that i can be clicking and viewing webpages and without notice everything seems to stutter to a halt, it just goes so slow and pages feel like they are heavy to load.

Now i have two possible ways to connect, one is wireless and one is a direct ethernet connection, the ethernet connection is 15 metres from the downstairs router, i find the direct ethernet connection tends to get 5.2mbp/s while the wireless tends to be 4mbp/s, there does not appear to be a problem with these connections that i can see.

As an example of a brief quick fix, when the internet goes into stutter mode and slows down i can get it back to normal for a few minutes by disconnecting the wireless connection and then re-connecting, sometimes if using wireless i can also get a quick fix by using the direct ethernet lead but this never lasts and the problem always comes back.

Now i had none of these problems with Zen internet, i only changed to Talk Talk LLU late last year.

It doesn't appear to be a speed issue since i get a consistent 5.2mbp/s with the ethernet lead connected and 4mbp/s with wireless.

Does anyone else get this issue, pages just seem to grind to a halt and not load or just hang there as if they are going to load, it feels like i am back on dial up.

Now this is not a constant issue, it just seems to come and go but it does happen frequently and i'm wondering why and if anyone can recommend a few things to fix this issue.

Try this open a DOS command prompt window and type

ping -t www.thinkbroadband.com

this should result in a ping once a second to 80.249.99.130, when the pages stop loading is ping still working? If no, then try this next

ping -t 192.168.1.1

(NOTE the default IP of TalkTalk modems is that IP address, but it may be differnet so use route print and look for the gateway address.

You could have two command prompt windows open, and do the pings at the same time. if the 192 address fails then it is a local wireless/ethernet/PC issue, but if that continues and thinkbroadband does not, then we are looking at a possible ADSL or TalkTalk issue.

if both of Andrew's tests pass, a third test is to check your DNS server is responding.

This really depends where in the webpage loading sequence the stuttering is happening...have you noticed whether your browser stalls at "looking up [webpage name]..." or "connecting to [webpage name]..." or maybe "waiting for [webpage name]" or "transferring from [webpage name]" ? These are firefox labels, Chrome seems to just have "sending request" and "waiting for" which is less useful.

If the stalling is during the "looking up [webpage name]" stage then you could have an issue with DNS servers. I think TT may have an issue with one of theirs... 3 weeks back a family friend on opal had some issues which seemed to be fixed by switching to 8.8.8.8 (google DNS).

To test the DNS server:

In a similar command prompt/DOS window type nslookup and press enter
This should connect you to your default dns server and leave a > prompt
type a web address for example www.heb.com and press enter
you should get back a "non-authorative answer" and an IP address for that website

When your internet is misbehaving try a few NEW websites in here. I recommend any 3 letter site because you can make them up and nearly all are real eg www.abc.com www.abd.com etc

If you are not getting fast answers (less than a second) then this might be the cause of the stuttering

I tried the suggestions by both of you and i was able to ping thinkbroadband ok, i'm using a Netgear router and when i do nslookup i get this.

default server unknown
address 192.168.0.1

Is this what i should be getting. ?

I also get a non-authorative answer and an IP address when entering website names.

Edited by deleted (Wed 04-Apr-12 20:59:00)

Try changing to use another different DNS server on the PC

http://sohonetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/how-to-set...

Shows how to do this, using the Google DNS.

the 192.168.0.1 is the ip address of your router. This means you are using the DNS servers that it is given when it connects to talktalk, so you are using talktalk's dns servers.

Follow Andrew's link and change to google's DNS server to see if this fixes your issue.

Did you manage to see which part of loading the page it stutters on?