In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

Then he basically needs to push the support staff more because that would show as a fail on any BT recorded speed test, they are not doing all that they can.

OP said: "I've talked to my ISP, Freeola (Entanet), and but they say the achieved speed is within acceptable limits and can't be investigated." - might need a very strong push then!

1. user is using a DG834 so no error counts
2. Sync >20 Meg on 13dB attenuation is fine, suggesting no major noise issue
3. Backed up 3dB target that line is running
4. ISP is one of those that would have walked through the usual steps

Most of us who answer questions spend a fair bit of time using the wonderous Google and read ultra interesting documents on SINET. Also a lot of help is based around pattern matching in our heads over time, and observing the symptons and seeing how right we were or not when poster comes back to us.

MTU issues usually highlight with https sites not working too, rather than a classical throughput issue. Also if was noise based then I'd hope ISP would have noted the error counts that are visible to them over the BT Wholesale interfaces, a good ISP can also see a lines history.

As your experience sounds pretty old, i.e. not having seen MTU issues with WBC which has been around for ages now, I suggest a day or two reading at www.sinet.bt.com

In reply to a post by 4M2:

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

Then he basically needs to push the support staff more because that would show as a fail on any BT recorded speed test, they are not doing all that they can.

OP said: "I've talked to my ISP, Freeola (Entanet), and but they say the achieved speed is within acceptable limits and can't be investigated." - might need a very strong push then!

Unless I'm again sadly out of date in terms of information, 11mb out of 17mb would basically be a breach of the lower threshold which by ISP and Ofcom standards I believe is 30% of the rated speed for the line.

Has that suddenly changed too? lol

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

So rather than just say my information is wrong provide me with evidence or reasoning on how my answers are incorrect and what they should actually be rather than just say its out of date.

2 out of 3 ain't bad!

And on the other, MTUs, yes they certainly did change with WBC but you were only thinking IPStream as you now admit. So I wasn't far out by saying you were still in the 20th Century .

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

In reply to a post by 4M2:

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

Then he basically needs to push the support staff more because that would show as a fail on any BT recorded speed test, they are not doing all that they can.

OP said: "I've talked to my ISP, Freeola (Entanet), and but they say the achieved speed is within acceptable limits and can't be investigated." - might need a very strong push then!

Unless I'm again sadly out of date in terms of information, 11mb out of 17mb would basically be a breach of the lower threshold which by ISP and Ofcom standards I believe is 30% of the rated speed for the line.

Has that suddenly changed too? lol

What do you suggest then: perhaps the OP could send the results of a few BT speed tests to the ISP to prove the point, if they are ignoring or not seeing them?

We are still in the 20th century for a bit, upgrading the exchanges to be 21CN doesn't fix the 20CN cabling infrastructure. Its like saying we'll upgrade to a gigabit ethernet card when your running the link on CAT1 cabling. Only as good as the worst component in my eyes.

But despite that, this is a throughput issue, and yes I have seen people on 3db margins having issues but then after a forced reset to 6db have a better time with their connection until the equivalent of Rambo kicks in and knocks it back down to 3db, so I guess I was limited in the information I could gather with old eco plus and KBD

In reply to a post by 4M2:

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

In reply to a post by 4M2:

... nested quotes trimmed ...

OP said: "I've talked to my ISP, Freeola (Entanet), and but they say the achieved speed is within acceptable limits and can't be investigated." - might need a very strong push then!

Unless I'm again sadly out of date in terms of information, 11mb out of 17mb would basically be a breach of the lower threshold which by ISP and Ofcom standards I believe is 30% of the rated speed for the line.

Has that suddenly changed too? lol

What do you suggest then: perhaps the OP could send the results of a few BT speed tests to the ISP to prove the point, if they are ignoring or not seeing them?

This would have to be handled by a more thorough BTW investigation because I believe an SFI will not be able to see the issue. Just speculation here but maybe they are on a 2nd gen line card with the bit swapping issues (Fujitsu Siemens mark 1 cards).

Either way out of our hands

In reply to a post by Kaytfoh:

yes I have seen people on 3db margins having issues

Yes, and we've seen many people, incl. myself, on WBC 3 dB NM not having any issues.

And with the ones that do have issues, it's usually discons rather than low throughput, tho' it is true that sometimes high error rates w/out discons forcing retransmissions will damp the throughput.

High amounts of initialisations and retrains can be seen by ISPs, well ... If they are any good that is

Wow! Thanks for all the discussion and feedback from everyone, I'm amazed by the extensive knowledge out there in the ether.

So, from reading all the posts here, it seems that I need to push hard on my ISP to investigate the situation. One point I perhaps didn't make 100% clear, is that my ISP said that the current speed was such that *BT* would not investigate it - but it sounds from what people have said here that that is bobbins and I should be expecting a minimum throughput speed of 30% less than the line speed.

The PC that I ran the BTW tests from mostly is running Windows 7, but I have also tried from another machine running Linux (CentOS 6) and got the same result. My ISP asked me to run the BTW tests when I first queried the speed with them, they told me they do have access to the results.

The master socket and router are in an under-stairs cupboard, co-located with a 16-port Gigabit switch (Netgear Prosafe - unmanaged, so I can't read throughput from it) and an RJ45 patch panel. The mains electricity fusebox is also in close proximity - I wonder if any of these factors affect the noise levels on the DSL line?