help with router stats please

[earthlover]

Hi there,

I'm trying to find out if it's worth me taking 02's Premium package with 20meg. 

My house is circa 1.2 km from exchange.  I have BT b/band 8meg at present.  I get about 4.5meg at good times.

I looked at my router stats and they say:

Connection speed  8128 Down / 448 Up
Line attenuation 17db Down  / 3.5db Up
SNRM  8db Down / 25db Up

I checked these yesterday and today and they don't change at all, in fact all the info there is always exactly the same.  I thought the figures were supposed to fluctuate during the course of the day.

My router is a Netgear Wireless ADSL Modem DG834G v3.

Any suggestions / opinions gratefully received.

[pintosal]

That close to the exchange, if your line is high quality and not subject to noise interference, then you will get a very stable SNRM.

Probably someone with an O2 accound will advise on their experiences, but you might want to check out the Kitz ISP pages
http://www.kitz.co.uk/isp/index.htm

[earthlover]

Thanks Pintosal for your reply.

I know 02 have a good star rating with comparison sites etc.

 What I really wanted to know is whether my line stats look OK,  particularly the Attenuation figures.  I was told the download /upload ratio for Attenuation should be about 50% but mine aren't. 

Also, if when I check my stats they have never changed is normal.

[roseway]

I was told the download /upload ratio for Attenuation should be about 50% but mine aren't.

This is a bit of a myth, presumably based on the observation that typical values are quite often roughly in a 2:1 ratio. But attenuation is measured in dB, which is a logarithmic measurement, so to talk about one value being half of another is meaningless. With logarithmic values it's the difference between the two numbers which is meaningful, not the ratio.

Your stats look pretty good, and if your connection is stable and the stats remain largely unchanged, then you should certainly benefit from moving to an ADSL2+ connection. However your downstream noise margin is perhaps a bit on the low side, suggesting that there is some interference affecting the connection to a degree, and it might be worth investigating this a bit before upgrading. Monitoring the connection for a while using Routerstats would help a lot.

[HPsauce]

You should get awesome speeds with O2 (LLU), almost certainly over 20mbps.  

Don't forget almost all your current figures are effectively "capped" as you are well within the range for a very clean and stable 8mbps service.

Note that if you switch to O2 and wish to continue using your DG834Gv3 rather than the router they supply, it is NOT optimal so will probably be speed-limited to some extent. v4 is the only DG834 or DG834G that works well on O2/Be (DG834GT and some others are excellent).

[Oranged]

This is a bit of a myth, presumably based on the observation that typical values are quite often roughly in a 2:1 ratio. But attenuation is measured in dB, which is a logarithmic measurement, so to talk about one value being half of another is meaningless. With logarithmic values it's the difference between the two numbers which is meaningful, not the ratio.

This is what I like about this site....you can always learn something. I always believed it was the ratio between the downstream and upstream.

So if a downstream attenuation was say, 8dB and the upstream was 0dB that wouldn't necessarily indicate a fault or problem ?

[roseway]

So if a downstream attenuation was say, 8dB and the upstream was 0dB that wouldn't necessarily indicate a fault or problem ?

It might indicate that you live in the exchange.
I guess it's an unlikely combination of figures, but not totally impossible. It would probably indicate some inaccuracy in the router's calculations.

[earthlover]

Thank you all very much for your input. That has certainly given me more confidence that I would be doing the right thing by switching.

One of the reasons I asked is because when I checked the map of my area on the speedchecker website none of the dwellings were getting better than 14meg and some that were on BE and Virgin Media 20 and 24 meg packages were getting lousy speeds.  I suppose that its only when you're getting bad speeds that you need to check, maybe. The best was Orange  Home Select 20meg that had just under 14meg.  But some were paying for 20 and 24 meg and getting about 5meg!

So I was thinking if they are not too much further away than me from the exchange maybe I wouldn't get good speeds either.

I guess its worth a try.  Do you agree?

HP sauce

I'd be interested to know which are  the other routers that work well with 02.  I use the Netgear because I can limit the access to our network.  I hear that with the 02 one you can't do that so it is less secure.

Thanks Roseway for the info.  Glad to know that the attenuation is OK. I will click on the stats link.  I have to tell you though that I am not a techie type and it may be a bit beyond me!  See how I go.

Thanks again to you all.

[earthlover]

I did a bt speed test this afternoon and even after reading the explanation of the results I still don't understand them. Can anyone explain in simple layman's terms the difference between the Best Effort Test and the Assured Rate Test?

The BE Test is result 6804Kbps and the AR Test result is 534Kpbs.

Is this good , bad or normal?

Thanks.