Hi, hope someone can help. I would love some clarification about what I should be expecting from speeds and whether changing my router might help.
Please excuse my lack of correct terminology on here - this broadband stuff is all new to me but I've been reading around this excellent site and the Hmmm site of B4dgers and am learning fast.
Some history: I have been having problems with speeds from my ISP. Once upon a time when I first signed up to the 8M service with my ISP (around 18 months/2 years ago) I noticed that I was syncing at about 6.5Mbps and I paid little further attention to it. My browsing was fast and efficient and I was happy. Over the last year or so, my browsing has become a lot slower. I only found the time to start looking into why a few months ago and realised that I have been getting more like 3.5Mbps sync and hence associated lower throughput during this time. (The change I believe coincided with when my ISP moved me off BT equipt and onto Tiscali equipt at the exchange). Throughout all of this, I was just using a simple Speedtouch 330 modem for my broadband.
When I reported the problem a few months back, speedtests showed that I was getting particularly low throughput even for those sync speeds and my ISP insisted I try a router instead of my modem, so I borrowed a Netgear DG834 from a friend. No difference experienced, so after more months of messing around, my ISP decided to move me back onto BT equipment. But then things got worse; I started getting a fixed 2Mbps sync instead!
More months of messing around and many further speedtests later, my ISP finally agreed it could be a fault and sent a BT engineer out. He found they had indeed set me up on the 2M service rather than the 8M service (we had suggested this to the ISP but they had said they had checked with BT that it wasn't the case - well obviously it was!); this got me back up to the 3.5M sync service that I was experiencing on the Tiscali equipt. I also smiled sweetly at him and he went away and changed my line pair to a lovely new copper one while he was about it. (Line attenuation immediately went down from 39dB to 33 dB as a result
)
This was Fri morning. Immediately, I noticed a difference: I started syncing mostly at 7-8Mbps. Hooray! However, that evening during busy hours, I started experiencing some loss of syncs (SNR fluctuated between 5 and 0, possibly lower), but 99% of the time I would resync immediately up to that level and only received one lower sync rate of 6200kbps. As a result my IP profile went down from 7000 to 5500
.This morning I disconnected briefly and set up a Speedtouch 585v7 router that I just purchased as I read it was more less sensitive to losing sync. It synced at 7200kbps with 5dB noise margin. Just now (Tues lunchtime) I checked and suddenly I am getting only 5088kbps and my SNR is up to 15dB and hence my IP profile is now getting lower and lower. I am currently in the 10 day training period (day 4/5) and so I am worried that my MSR will be set unrealistically low as a result.
I have had great arguments with my ISP because they gave me a fault threshold of just 1.8M on my line previously when they set me up wrongly on the BT equipt recently as a 2M user by mistake. They kept telling me that BT would not accept it as a fault because my throughput was above this! I am very keen that a realistic MSR is set for me to avoid future conflict.
So now I finally get to my point (sorry about the waffling). What speeds does anyone think that should I be expecting?
I live 700m as the crow flies from the exchange in a small market town. My ISP said my previous line length was 2.2km (a bit long?) from the exchange (I was getting attenuation of 39dB and noise margin around 12 dB). My new line is only 33dB attenuation and so hopefully taking a shorter route to the exchange. It is also a nice new copper one and not aluminium. On connection I got 7-8Mbps at 5dB SNR immediately.
I am still syncing mostly at over 7000kbps and this morning I reached the dizzy heights of 8032 kbps with 5dB Noise margin. I disconnected briefly a few times to set up the new router, resynced after set up at 7200 (at 5dB) and when I get back from lunch find I am now down to 5088kbps (at a non-busy time of day) with a 15 dB noise margin. Why have they turned my noise margin up so high in one go? Would BT have done this because i disconnected earlier and as a result I lost sync over lunch, or would I have lost sync over lunch and then this happened? I am wondering if it was an enforced loss of sync or the router didn't cope. It seems a funny time of day for traffic noise to be the cause.
I just disconnected and reconnected and got the same result.
Can anyone please help me understand what is going on? My ISP said my speeds will vary in the first 10 days but the lower speeds are surely not good news for my MSR and furure fault reporting, particularly if it was caused just by my disconnections to set up the new router. Also I read that if the SNR exceeds 15dB, it gets stuck up there and doesn't come down by itself. So my speeds will be even lower.
Thanks folks!