This may sound whacky and nuts, but can you please tell me...

Why you need a broadband tester when you can just check the latest bill of your internet connection? Don't you already know what speed are you paying for and whether you get all of it when downloading porn?

In Finland we have this thing called "this speed costs this much and that speed costs that much", so I don't know about your medieval steam powered ye olde interwebths.

Quote from spankmeyer :

This may sound whacky and nuts, but can you please tell me...

Why you need a broadband tester when you can just check the latest bill of your internet connection? Don't you already know what speed are you paying for and whether you get all of it when downloading porn?

In Finland we have this thing called "this speed costs this much and that speed costs that much", so I don't know about your medieval steam powered ye olde interwebths.

yes you pay for the certain service. but alot of places now say "upto such and such speed" as they cant seem to get a good service everywhere. And also i know at least one person who is paying for and being gauranteed 2mbits/s and is only receiving 512kb/s

Quote from spankmeyer :

This may sound whacky and nuts, but can you please tell me...

Why you need a broadband tester when you can just check the latest bill of your internet connection? Don't you already know what speed are you paying

Ah yes your ISP say they are providing you 2mb & when you test it, it is actualy less than 1mb . I complained to orange as I am not getting what i'm paying for. I wonder how many other gamers are not recieving the service they are paying for?

The ISP will supply 'UP TO' the quoted value, but real world variables (distance from exhange, quality of line, household wiring/interference etc etc) means it cannot be guaranteed. You pay for 2MB but only get 1MB, but they are perfectly within their rights to supply you like that.

As Tristan says, getting the guaranteed speeds is not possible on a home connection, and on many common business lines. It's only when you get into leased lines, and peering other networks, that you're "guaranteed" bandwidth (and I use that term loosely, because of the nature of the internet).

If your ISP is daft enough to actually guarantee a speed, then you may have a case. You are also within your right to ask for a line test - which performs an automated test of the BT system, and may produce results if they find there's a fault.

If you can, keep extension cables to a minimum, and always make sure you that you have the microfilter in the correct part of the chain. You may also want to try swapping the microfilter out for a different one. Microfilters can be delicate things.

If you're on cable, the above things to check doesn't apply as it works in a very different way.

Holland:


UK:

far away:

HURR!

:eye-poppi

Some people have some fast connections (I'm not one of them ). Swear it doesn't feel like 2mb



EDIT: found a slow one

Quote from franky500 :

yes you pay for the certain service. but alot of places now say "upto such and such speed" as they cant seem to get a good service everywhere. And also i know at least one person who is paying for and being gauranteed 2mbits/s and is only receiving 512kb/s

Ahh yes, I get it. Actually now I remember why I switched from 'up to 8 megs' to 'guaranteed 2 mb'...

Though still I'm baffled why anyone would have to actually test their line. Surely many of you guys download big game demos (Supreme Commander rocks! -editor's note), mods etc. so just check the Firefox/Flashget/uTorrent maximum download speed?

It's the fancy speedo, isn't it?

Updated with some new spanky features

http://speedtest.net/index.php

Distance isnt quite everything....The countyrs advancement helps too..Chile is nearer than NZ, but slower!

Quote from SamH :

Fine!

?!?!?!?!?!?

/me gets dragged to someone elses house to "fix their wireless"

/me plugs it in via Ethernet

/me thinks the internet is slow for a 2 mbit pipe



Eeep! More upload than download! :S

EDIT - Wait, thats kb/s, not kbps :S In the router it says "ADSL Speed (DS/US) 160/448 Kbps"

125 KB/s would be fine for a 1 mbit pipe, but wth is up with the upload then

/me does more testing

Hmmmmm, i know f' all about ADSL lines, but this is what the router says:

Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 192 Kbps 448 Kbps
Noise Margin 7.9 dB 17.0 dB
Line Attenuation 58.0 dB 29.0 dB
Output Power 13.5 dBm 12.0 dBm
K (number of bytes in DMT frame) 7 15
R (number of check bytes in RS code word) 2 4
S (RS code word size in DMT frame) 2 4
D (interleaver depth) 16 8
Super Frames 5351 5349
Super Frame Errors 117 0
RS Words 181946 90933
RS Correctable Errors 10336 0
RS Uncorrectable Errors 263 0
HEC Errors 57 0
OCD Errors 0 0
LCD Errors 0 0
ES Errors 0 0

Any of that look dodgy?

I did an "ADSL BER" test and it said:
Tested Time 20
Total Transferred Bits 3477888
Total Error Bits 1091
Error Ratio 1.52e-06

I'll restart the router, but i'm not sure what else to do!

EDIT - Could overheating cause this? imo overheating would mean it would either work or go all fubar'ed with random errors, but it's bloody hot!

Oh "yay" i'm pulling 18.5 KB/s from UKCT.net

Ping UKCT.net gives me results of:
68 ms,
200 ms,
487 ms,
38 ms.

Google gives me nice 45-50 ms pings.

STCC site gives me 35-40 ms pings, and yet i pull from that at about 20 KB/s

Franky's server (grabbing S2X) nets me 70 KB/s, but after about 2 secs it falls to 20 KB/s

WTF is wrong with it?!

Quote from Jakg :

Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 192 Kbps 448 Kbps
Noise Margin 7.9 dB 17.0 dB
...
..
.

Yes that looks dodgy…
Your provider seems to synchronize the DSL connection at the wrong speed… I can’t see anything that you could do about that.
You should ask for the isp’s support.

I know it seems dodgy, i've tried everything on this PC to get it running before hooking up my PDA to find its justas slow.

Gotta be the line

I have found cable from modem to wall to be cause of such problems quite often, try to find some other cable which you could use and test with that?

Your line attenuation is a tad high tbh Jakg.

not my line, seems someone been plugging phones in with no micro-filters, and now i'm running with no phones plugged in i get this:



Still fairly dissapointing, esp seeing as the Router says "ADSL Speed (DS/US) 2784/448 Kbps"

Now for the killer:
"Statistics Downstream Upstream
Line Rate 2784 Kbps 448 Kbps
Noise Margin 9.5 dB 19.0 dB
Line Attenuation 54.0 dB 28.5 dB
Output Power 17.6 dBm 12.1 dBm"




Downloads are a tiny bit faster, pings are giving a steady 32 ms to UKCT.net, which is a little better.

/me thinks that it's gonna be a looooong night

Sorry to double post, but "http://speedtester.bt.com/" says:



"Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
Assured Rate IP profile on your line is - 135 kbps
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 101 kbps"

Time to try a different microfilter

EDIT - 2nd Microfilter:

"Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
Assured Rate IP profile on your line is - 135 kbps
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 92 kbps"

/me has run out of ideas

No phones plugged in, gotta be the line. M'eh, at least it works!

EDIT 3:

5,000 Miles away, crappy ping but the same download/upload - get the same to Sweden, UK (London/Maidenhead), LA & Auckland, a la here:

11,000 miles and yet it will barely pull a KB/s less than something less than 50 miles away.

I give up with this thing, /me is blaming BT!