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hopper.65
09-Feb-12, 20:41
My internet speed has become a joke particularly between 6pm - 10.30pm which of course is when i want to use it most, a speed test tells me that during these times i get less than 500 mp/s and my upload speed is less than 250mp/s which means i can stream nothing and a 30 min programme would take half a day to download, but who is responsible for the diabolical speed i get is it my ISP or is it the BT infrastructure?
I am within the Thurso area although i am not in the town centre where the Princes St exchange is i am not exactly in the sticks either!

Alrock
09-Feb-12, 21:31
Who is your ISP?

Oh.. also... what is "mp/s"?

hopper.65
09-Feb-12, 21:40
i am with aol which i moved to after previously using mad as a fish and sky which were just as bad, aol just supplied me with a new router but again no improvement, i know people slag aol but have at least found they are willing to try and do something whilst the other two couldn't of cared less.

Alrock
09-Feb-12, 21:45
Oooohhhh.... don't get me started about AOL....

See this thread for a bit more info. (http://forum.caithness.org/showthread.php?160763-Recommend-me-a-good-ISP)

Oh.... Also... As for "willing to try and do something".... I spent over £25 & almost 8 hours on the phone trying to get my slow speed sorted, they eventually tried to wash their hands of the problem blaming BT. Wasn't BTs fault as I found out when I moved to AAISP as the problem was instantly gone.

hopper.65
10-Feb-12, 00:55
What was it AOL was doing that caused your speed to slow? I think slow speeds are down to B.Ts rubbish infrastructure which looks to me as though it just aint fit for task!
Can ISPs do anything to make this better without B.T who look to me to be the real reason for a poor speed, i am no expert but can several ISPs provide different speeds in the same close proximity of each address they serve? If they do i doubt it is by much.

dragonfly
10-Feb-12, 07:56
we've just moved from AOL to BT...speeds with AOL on the day we were swapping over routers were 0.5mb when we swapped to BT later that morning it jumped to 6.2mb! move ISP and your speeds will increase

RecQuery
10-Feb-12, 09:37
My internet speed has become a joke particularly between 6pm - 10.30pm which of course is when i want to use it most, a speed test tells me that during these times i get less than 500 mp/s and my upload speed is less than 250mp/s which means i can stream nothing and a 30 min programme would take half a day to download, but who is responsible for the diabolical speed i get is it my ISP or is it the BT infrastructure?
I am within the Thurso area although i am not in the town centre where the Princes St exchange is i am not exactly in the sticks either!

BT infrastructure basically.

It sounds like your VP is over subscribed/congested (caused by someone somewhere in the supply and provisioning chain being cheap or lazy) therefore changing ISP wouldn't really make much different, unless for whatever odd reason they change your VP and most don't (mine, AAISP does). As an example say that the VP you're on has a 32Mbit/s (Megabits per second) capacity that means that it can be portioned out to 4 customers with each getting 8Mbit/s. However what they do is share out that VP to more than 4 customers, which is fine unless they all try to use it at maximum capacity at the same time (trying to download at full speed). That's why it's only noticeable between certain times, they're the times most people are home from work, school etc.

Basically what you need to is get BT (via your ISP) to do a TPM (Tie/Tied Pair Modification/Move) to transfer you onto another VP. Make sure you get your ISP to ask them not to the ZAP the existing port first, otherwise you'll be down for a couple of days. Depending on your ISP this could be difficult though, you might get through to the rare person that knows what they're talking about but failing that e-mail is your friend and try complaining to someone higher up. The problem is BT only guarantee 1.5Mbit/s - it might even be lower than that now - and lots of ISPs are reluctant to pursue speed problems. Use this http://speedtester.bt.com/ as your speedtester, BT and your ISP can actually see and care about those results, it doesn't work the whole time so you might need to keep on trying.

It might also be another device on your network or someone else using your wireless so check for stuff like that, disable wireless only plug one device into the router, try more than one also it might be something dodgy on one machine. Turn off everything connected to it, see how fast the lights blink etc.

hopper.65
11-Feb-12, 02:57
BT infrastructure basically.

It sounds like your VP is over subscribed/congested (caused by someone somewhere in the supply and provisioning chain being cheap or lazy) therefore changing ISP wouldn't really make much different, unless for whatever odd reason they change your VP and most don't (mine, AAISP does). As an example say that the VP you're on has a 32Mbit/s (Megabits per second) capacity that means that it can be portioned out to 4 customers with each getting 8Mbit/s. However what they do is share out that VP to more than 4 customers, which is fine unless they all try to use it at maximum capacity at the same time (trying to download at full speed). That's why it's only noticeable between certain times, they're the times most people are home from work, school etc.

Basically what you need to is get BT (via your ISP) to do a TPM (Tie/Tied Pair Modification/Move) to transfer you onto another VP. Make sure you get your ISP to ask them not to the ZAP the existing port first, otherwise you'll be down for a couple of days. Depending on your ISP this could be difficult though, you might get through to the rare person that knows what they're talking about but failing that e-mail is your friend and try complaining to someone higher up. The problem is BT only guarantee 1.5Mbit/s - it might even be lower than that now - and lots of ISPs are reluctant to pursue speed problems. Use this http://speedtester.bt.com/ as your speedtester, BT and your ISP can actually see and care about those results, it doesn't work the whole time so you might need to keep on trying.

It might also be another device on your network or someone else using your wireless so check for stuff like that, disable wireless only plug one device into the router, try more than one also it might be something dodgy on one machine. Turn off everything connected to it, see how fast the lights blink etc.

Thanks for taking the time to explain that, you obviously know what you are talking about and will take this route to try and sort it out, pretty sure nobody is hijacking my network as i do check the devices connected, the router is password protected, and any public sharing options are set to off.
I also can't see it being any nasties as it is fine during day and after say 11pm just bombs when people come home from work or school, and i scan often and every couple of weeks do a re-boot scan and though i have found a couple of trojans here before i have had no unwanted additions for well over a year.

secrets in symmetry
11-Feb-12, 21:39
My internet speed has become a joke particularly between 6pm - 10.30pm which of course is when i want to use it most, a speed test tells me that during these times i get less than 500 mp/s and my upload speed is less than 250mp/s which means i can stream nothing and a 30 min programme would take half a day to download, but who is responsible for the diabolical speed i get is it my ISP or is it the BT infrastructure?
I am within the Thurso area although i am not in the town centre where the Princes St exchange is i am not exactly in the sticks either!


Who is your ISP?

Oh.. also... what is "mp/s"?I suspect hopper.65 meant Mb/s - megabits per second - and was complaining of getting less than 0.500Mb/s = 500 kb/s (Kilobits per second.)

RecQuery refers to a VP - which means "virtual path", and is (I think) the "circuit" your internet connection travels between your exchange and the big bad world of the internet. I'm sure RecQuery will correct me if I'm wrong. It's virtual because it refers to software, not hardware.

RecQuery
13-Feb-12, 10:54
Thanks for taking the time to explain that, you obviously know what you are talking about and will take this route to try and sort it out, pretty sure nobody is hijacking my network as i do check the devices connected, the router is password protected, and any public sharing options are set to off.
I also can't see it being any nasties as it is fine during day and after say 11pm just bombs when people come home from work or school, and i scan often and every couple of weeks do a re-boot scan and though i have found a couple of trojans here before i have had no unwanted additions for well over a year.

It sounds like a congested VP I was just being a bit paranoid and covering everything. Even if you do get your ISP to book it out - they'll have to pass it onto to BT Wholesale to do stuff like this - BT Wholesale have a tendency of automatically rejecting almost everything the first couple of times (it's a really dodgy tactic) so you may need to keep trying with your ISP. Another tactic BT are found of is to mention chargeable engineer visits when none are required or to just send an engineer when they don't know what to do. You don't need an engineer for this it's done remotely, don't let them send one.

All of these potential troubles are essentially related to certain companies being cheap or just hiring for customer service ability instead of technically ability. So you end up with someone who sounds like they're smiling, is really sympathetic etc but doesn't know what they're talking about and can't fix your problem


RecQuery refers to a VP - which means "virtual path", and is (I think) the "circuit" your internet connection travels between your exchange and the big bad world of the internet. I'm sure RecQuery will correct me if I'm wrong. It's virtual because it refers to software, not hardware.

Basically yeah, it's do to with how ATM networks are setup and UK DSL is PPPoA(TM).