New connection, poor speeds

So after all the tribulations of a 10-week wait to have a phone line installed, only for BT to accidentally disconnect it next day and then take 5 days to reconnect, I arrived home to see the Netgear DG834 with a bank of green lights. Great! I thought.

Except that my downloads are abysmal, barely above dial-up speeds but upload isn't too bad:

Date 01/06/10 22:06:36
Speed Down 31.97 Kbps ( 0 Mbps )
Speed Up 371.14 Kbps ( 0.4 Mbps )

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/button/12754...

Router stats are:

/usr/sbin/adslctl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: ShowtimeRetrain Reason: 8000
Channel: FAST, Upstream rate = 448 Kbps, Downstream rate = 4960 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: G.DMT
Channel: Fast
Trellis: ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 4.1 11.0
Attn(dB): 54.0 31.0
Pwr(dBm): 19.6 12.6
Max(Kbps): 5184 728
Rate (Kbps): 4960 448


Any ideas where to start?

Edited by deleted (Tue 01-Jun-10 22:34:53)

Start with a BT speedtest to see your line profile

http://www.speedtester.bt.com/

Download speedachieved during the test was - 2534 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :4128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 3500 Kbps


Feels a lot slower than this - pages take ages to update.

In reply to a post by fiddler:

Download speedachieved during the test was - 2534 Kbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 600-7150 Kbps.
Additional Information:
Your DSL Connection Rate :4128 Kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 Kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP Profile for your line is - 3500 Kbps


Feels a lot slower than this - pages take ages to update.

I thought you said it was downloads? Are downloads ok now?

Pages taking ages indicates a different problem.

Try setting the DNS.

I like to use 2 sets.

1 is ours: 212.23.3.100 and 212.23.6.100 and I sometimes use Googles for people who are heading overseas: 8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8.

See if this resolves some of the issue.

Things seem to have stabilized now - pages load as expected and my downloads run at about 300KBs so that's certainly a usable bandwidth. Not sure what the cause of the initial crawling along was - it certainly got better overnight.

Thanks everyone for your help.