Advice Please, speed dropped to 130kbps!

[fiddiwebb]

Hello

Wondered if anyone could advise, I'm new to the forums here so please  be gentle 

I have had a sudden drop in my broadband speed down to what seems a constant 130kbps downspeed, I've been  with Madasafish Max Plus broadband for the last 3-4 years and had a good speed of between 5-7.5 Mb.

I noticed last Thursday that my speed had dropped to a constant 130kbps and emailed MAAF who ran some tests and said that the line was okay but to do various checks, router, plugging into master socket ect. they also said to leave the router on and not to turn it off and check my speeds in 3 days and see if there is an improvement.

We normally turn off our router when we go to bed and have had no problems with speed but in the last week or so we have had a friend stay who has used the internet 3-4 times during the day and has turned the router off and on evert time, would this affect our speed?

I ran BTs speedtester and the results gave this...

Download speed achieved 105kpbs
For your connection the acceptable range of speeds is 50-250kbps

DSL connection rate 7136kbps (down)  448kbps (up)

IP profile for your line is 135kbps

These are my router stats Linksys WAG-54GS..........
Channel: INTR
Upstream: 448kbps
Downstream: 7136kbps
Linkpower state: LO
Mode: G.DMT
Channel: Interleave
Trellis: ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
 
SNR: 14.8 down  22.0 up
ATTN: 14.0            6.5
Pwr: 15.8            12.1
Max: 7680(kbps)           1060
Rate: 7136(kbps)           448 

Can anyone make sense of the above figure and if I leave the router on instead of turning it off it should get back to what it was?

Many thanks 

[roseway]

Hi and welcome,

Your download speed is low because your IP profile is low. This is because you must have had a low-speed re-sync recently. If this low speed re-sync was a one-off, then your IP profile should recover within a day or two, and your download speeds will be back to what they were before.

However, it's possible that you have some sort of problem with your connection, which will result in more low speed events. There's a host of different possible reasons for this. To help diagnose this you could have a read of the troubleshooting guide and the associated pages. Another thing which is very helpful is to install Routerstats (if it's compatible with your router) to monitor the connection over time.

It's not a good idea to switch the router on and off frequently, because this may be interpreted by the BT equipment as instability, and your target noise margin would be increased to stabilise the connection. Looking at your stats, it looks quite likely that this has happened, although it wouldn't have had a big effect on your your very short connection, and doesn't explain the problem. We normally recommend that you leave the router switched on all the time, although switching off at night is fine.

[fiddiwebb]

Hello roseway

Thank you for your reply.

I'm glad you think it should be back to normal, fingers crossed, in a few days.
I did change the microfilter for a new one and plugged into the master socket yesterday and have left the modem on, none of the router settings had been changed and no settings (firewall) had been changed on the main computer that is connected to the router with a ethernet cable.

The connection and speed has always been pretty reliable since we have had it and I suppose with the router being turned on/off every few hours during the day in the last week or so that this has triggered the problem.

The speed last wednesday night was fine as I was watching a BBC iplayer programme but the next day it had dropped to 130kbps which is very slow!

Anyway thank you again and I will see if I can use Routerstats with my router as you suggested. could I ask how often do you think I should run BTs speedtester to check my speed.


fidd 

[roseway]

I don't think there's any point in running the BT speedtester on any regular basis, but only when you want to check your IP profile or run a speed test which isn't affected by ISP traffic management. There are plenty of other speed testers which do a perfectly reasonable job, such as http://speedtest.net/

[fiddiwebb]

I'm a happy bunny 

Had a speedcheck last night and my speed and IP profile have gone up.

5533kbps download and IP profile 6000.

So I'll think I will just leave the router on 24/7 now.

Thanks.

[roseway]

Good news.