Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Floydoid]

I'd like to check my line stats, not for any reason other than I've never done it before, and I thought it might be something useful to do so I can hopefully learn a bit more about ADSL technology.  So I was wondering if you guys and girls would be able to walk me through the procedure, and maybe even offer some hints and tweaks.

[roseway]

Your first port of call should be http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.htm which tells you how to get the stats for many popular modems and routers. If yours isn't on the list then if you let us know what it is we might be able to help. Tweaks will depend on what you're using too.

[Floydoid]

I'm using the good old speedtouch 330... here's my stats:

ReceiveAttenuation_dB= 25
ReceiveMargin_dB= 19
SendAttenuation_dB= 15
SendMargin_dB= 16

I haven't a clue what those mean, but am willing to learn... now is there anything else you need to know?

[BTW Kitz, on the speedtouch page that you link to, there is no mention of Dr Speedtouch... unless I'm missing something... I found it a bit confusing.  The direct link to the file works though.]

[mr_chris]

Explanations of what these figures relate to are on this page - there's a wealth of information about ADSL on this site.

The best bit is, that all of it is presented in a form that is generally understandable by non-techies, which is the beauty of Kitz's style. And, as far as I can tell, everything is accurate too, so you won't be fed any duff information either

So if you're willing to learn you could do worse than spend some time reading the ADSL Section of kitz.co.uk

[guest]

If a ST330 is the one after the original blue squashed thing (frog or stingray it got called IIRC) then your stats are quite similar to the way mine were - I have 23dB "ReceiveAttenuation" and 13dB "SendAttenuation" (neither have change except on Be but they tested differently).

Your margins aren't so good but then I don't know what speed you sync at as the margins will go down as the speed goes up.

I sync at 20Mbps with a margin of 9dB. Your line can go considerably faster than the old froggie could manage - with the right provider and if your exchange is enabled by them.

[Floydoid]

Actually it's a little grey froggie... so what now?

[guest]

Well what are you trying to achieve? More knowledge or are you unhappy with your current speeds?

You won't learn much from a USB modem anyway IMHO as I'm unaware of anyone who makes them now as they were all USB v1.0/1.1 which means they can't really handle much more than 10Mbps.

[Floydoid]

Oh forget it, seems I'm wasting everyone's time.

[roseway]

Hey, you're not wasting our time. I think that the point is that USB modems don't give a lot of useful information. To get a real understanding of what's going on, we would need to know the connection speed (up and down) as well as the attenuation and margin figures, and it would appear that this information isn't available from the ST330. It may be available from your ISP. Armed with that information we could give some meaningful advice about how well your connection is currently performing and what you might do to improve it.

[guest]

I'm just unsure what it is you're wanting to learn/do

There isn't an awful lot you can learn from one connection really and USB devices are generally pretty dumb anyway - if I remember right the original Speedtouch BT supplied didn't even have flash memory fitted so every time you connected it then it loaded the firmware (modems operating system if you like) from the host computer.

Routers now are far more sophisticated and more information can be extracted from them - if you have the right router you can see noise levels changing in near real-time and graphs of noise vs frequency. You can learn a bit from that but your line looks much like mine as I said so I doubt you'd see anything on <8Mbps other than a nice graph which indicates no problems. Once you increase the speed then (electrical) noise becomes more and more of a problem and when you push your line to the limits (and beyond) using something like the DMT Tool then you learn what not to do

Bit more info would be good?

[Floydoid]

>>we would need to know the connection speed (up and down) as well as the attenuation and margin figures

Where do I get that from?

>>I'm just unsure what it is you're wanting to learn/do

I'm just a dumb novice on adsl technology, so learning anything would be nice

>>Routers now are far more sophisticated and more information can be extracted from them - if you have the right router...

Why would I need a router, and what would the 'right one' be?

>>Bit more info would be good?

Such as?

[roseway]

>> Where do I get that from?

There lies the rub, I'm afraid. I don't think it's available with the ST330, which is a relic of the early days of ADSL. The information might be available from your ISP's customer portal. You could run BT's speedtest at http://speedtester.bt.com/ which will give you your downstream connection speed (but you might have to try several times before it goes through).

The links to Kitz' site which Chris gave above will give you a lot of information about how ADSL works, but for real diagnosis of your particular line you would need to get a router to replace the ST330. This needn't cost a fortune - there are some bargains at http://www.dsldepot.co.uk/index.asp? and I can personally recommend the ST576v5, as that's what I'm using now.

[Floydoid]

Eric I see that is a wireless one... I'm a bit old fashioned and like copper wire connectors between everything.  So any recommendations for a wired router?

I'm also curious to know, would a router serve me better than the good old ST330?

[Pwiggler]

floydy

that particular router also has ports in the back to stick your 'copper' into and has the capabilities of wireless (which you might use in the future).

its also a good learning platform so you can relate all the info on this site to something on your screen and for 11 quid ... thats amazing !!!

you shouldnt get either a faster or slower connection with a router but it does have handy things built in like MAC address filtering/firewall.

[Floydoid]

One reason why I'm a bit sceptical about having wireless network is that I live in the middle of a block of flats, and don't really want anyone trying to steal my broadband... also being a single PC household ('cept for my spare which occasionally gets put on line for updates), I think wired would suit me better.