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[emmak]

Hi All,

I'm in the sticks, so limited to 8 meg Broadband. However, I can actually see the exchange from my house. I've bought a Billion router last year in the hope of extracting as much as possible from the line, but am a bit unimpressed with the interface and the fact that the WIFI drops a lot on my macs. So today I have pulled out my old DG834G v2 and installed the DGteam firmware. All's well, but the SNR looks a bit high at 12 - on the v2 version of the firmware you can't change the SNR - Can you help me interpret my stats - I can hit 7mb on speedtest.net, http://test.speedtester.bt.com/ gave me 6529 - so I know I'm not going to do much better - but given I'm about 150 yards from the exchange can I squeeze anymore from my setup?

Cheers,
Emma

Web Interface stats
System Up Time 04:33:47
Port   Status   TxPkts   RxPkts   Collisions   Tx B/s   Rx B/s   Up Time
WAN   PPPoA   847997   1704757   0   4919   144513   04:31:17
LAN   10M/100M   1711812   860170   0   144886   5942   04:33:41

ADSL Link   Downstream   Upstream
Connection Speed   8128 kbps   832 kbps
Line Attenuation   3 db   2 db
Noise Margin   12 db   10 db


Telnet Stats...

AR7 DSL Modem Statistics:
--------------------------------
[DSL Modem Stats]
        US Connection Rate:     832     DS Connection Rate:     8128
        DS Line Attenuation:    3       DS Margin:              12
        US Line Attenuation:    4       US Margin:              10
        US Payload :            110482800       DS Payload:             2300875824
        US Superframe Cnt :     911238  DS Superframe Cnt:      911239
        US Transmit Power :     0       DS Transmit Power:      0
        LOS errors:             0       SEF errors:             0
        Errored Seconds:        0       Severely Err Secs:      0
        Frame mode:             3       Max Frame mode:         0
        Trained Path:           0       US Peak Cell Rate:      1962
        Trained Mode:           3       Selected Mode:          1
        ATUC Vendor Code:       414C4342        ATUC Revision:  1
        Hybrid Selected:        1       Trellis:                1
        Showtime Count:         1       DS Max Attainable Bit Rate: 10976 kbps
        BitSwap:                1       US Max Attainable Bit Rate:     n/a
        Annex:                  AnxA    psd_mask_qualifier: 0x0000
        Power Management Status: L0     DS HLINSC: 0
        US ACTPSD:              -345    DS ACTPSD: -365
        Total init. errors:     0       Total init. timeouts: 0
        Showtime init. errors:  0       Showtime init. timeouts: 0
        Last showtime init. errors: 0   Last showtime init. timeouts: 0
        ATUC ghsVid:  0f 00 41 4c 43 42 00 00
        T1413Vid: 00 00         T1413Rev: 00            VendorRev: 00
        ATUR ghsVid:  b5 00 54 53 54 43 00 00
        T1413Vid: 00 00 T1413Rev: 00    VendorRev: 00

        [Upstream (TX) Interleave path]
        CRC:    0       FEC:    0       NCD:    1
        LCD:    0       HEC:    0

        [Downstream (RX) Interleave path]
        CRC:    0       FEC:    0       NCD:    0
        LCD:    0       HEC:    0

        [Upstream (TX) Fast path]
        CRC:    1       FEC:    0       NCD:    0
        LCD:    0       HEC:    0

        [Downstream (RX) Fast path]
        CRC:    0       FEC:    0       NCD:    0
        LCD:    0       HEC:    0

[ATM Stats]
        [Upstream/TX]
        Good Cell Cnt:  2301725
        Idle Cell Cnt:  28095799

        Tx Packets Dropped Count:       0
        Tx Bad Packets Count:   7

        [Downstream/RX)]
        Good Cell Cnt:  47934913
        Idle Cell Cnt:  249025827
        Bad Hec Cell Cnt:       0
        Overflow Dropped Cell Cnt:      0
        Rx Packets Dropped Count:       0
        Rx Bad Packets Count:   0


[SAR AAL5 Stats]
        Tx PDU's:       811013
        Rx PDU's:       1630379
        Tx Total Bytes: 77565711
        Rx Total Bytes: 2250035769
        Tx Total Error Counts:  0
        Rx Total Error Counts:  64


[OAM Stats]
        Near End F5 Loop Back Count:    0
        Near End F4 Loop Back Count:    0
        Far End F5 Loop Back Count:     0
        Far End F4 Loop Back Count:     0
        SAR OAM Ping Response Drop Count=0

 

[roseway]

The reason your noise margin is fairly high is simply that your attenuation is very low and you're connecting at the maximum speed possible. There's nothing to be improved there.

Your actual download speed is set by your IP profile, which is 7150 kbps (again the maximum possible on an 8 Mbps service). There are many factors which can result in the download speed being less than this, and I'm afraid there's not much you can do to change this. It may be limited by congestion, either in the exchange or in your ISP's system, or your ISP may use traffic management to prioritise different sorts of traffic. The only way to avoid some of these problems is to use an ISP which is well resourced and doesn't use traffic management, such as Zen.

[emmak]

Thanks Roseway - actually I'm with Zen, on whatever the low contention super premium package is called (Zen Office 8000), and our exchange is in the only village in any direction for 5 miles - sam knows says 1,224 residential premises, 93 non-residential premises on it. Might it just be rubbish copper down the street?

So no point in my buying a netgear dg834gt and putting DGteam firmware on it so I can modify the SNR?

[roseway]

No, there's nothing wrong with your connection, nothing to be improved. Tweaking your target noise margin wouldn't get you any more speed, because you're already connecting at the maximum speed possible. Zen don't throttle any traffic, so your download speed is being limited to a degree by network conditions at the time, or possibly by some non-optimal configuration in your computers. In Windows PCs the MTU and RWIN values can be critical, but I don't know if this also applies to Macs.

[emmak]

Thanks for all your help Roseway..

[waltergmw]

Hi Emma,

I'm delighted to see you are a user of these splendid machines. (I still have a working hard disk-less Mac plus from 1985 that I sometimes demonstrate to school children)

As you might expect Zen have an article on MTU settings which includes advice on Apple Macs as well as PCs.

http://www.zen.co.uk/support/tools.aspx

Let's hope that BT will eventually enable 21CN WBC or some brave company will deploy FTTC for you.

Kind regards,
Walter

[emmak]

Hi Walter,

Good aren't they. I have a plus, and an SE, but mostly fire up http://minivmac.sourceforge.net when I want to play with the original Prince of Persia

I've been using terminal to fiddle with the MTU's this morning, although I can't see a speed increase as yet.

And yes, fingers crossed for BT - although we fall into the "no date set" category....so it may be some time.

Still, I have a good, solid connection, so it could be a lot worse

Regards, Emma