Re: Please Please help me :[
 

in an ideal world you would have cable running throughout the house providing wired connections to all the rooms but if you was actually going to put it through the wall to wall jacks it cost £hundreds. The cheap way to do it would be to connect an 8 port switch to a router/shub and run cables from the switch under carpet to each of the rooms and just have a loose cable coming out somewhere in each room. There would be no installation costs and the cable itself is as cheap as chips.

I can not over estimate how important wired connections are. It sounds a silly way of putting it but wired connections give you a 100% pure and unimpeded connection to the router. Basically you'll have a 1gbit lan and you don't have to worry about interference. pings or anything else because all your traffic is moving at "wire speed" and over the short distances you are talking over you'll have a ping of less than 1ms to your router. If there is ever anything wrong with your internet connection you know (for the most part) that it is your outside connection to VM that is the issue and not something in the house. That being said, there are still lots of things going on like peak time congestion which I mentioned earlier which can still prevent you from getting 30mbits all the time.

If you wanted to go with plan b for as cheap as possible then you would buy a good 8 port switch (£40), you would need to keep the shub in router mode (not ideal) and run the cables round the house as I have suggested.

If you wanted to do it properly (which would be worth it in the long run) then you would buy a new router and switch, put the shub in modem mode and connect it to the new router. Attach the new switch to the new router and run cable round the house. Upgrade the package to 100mbits and allow everyone to either use wired connections for static devices like pcs and you still have the new super new wireless for tablets/mobiles etc.

It sounds like a bit of a faff but it is like putting a skeleton in somebody's body; once it is in that is it and it will continue to benefit you everyday in so many ways for years to come. I don't expect your landlord will go for it at all but in case you were wondering I would say £140 for super duper new router and switch and £70 for 7 x 50m cat5e (here)

The important thing to emphasise and what I am sure won't be appreciated at all is the fact that you are putting the network infrastructure (albeit minimally) in place to provide fast and reliable internet access throughout the house which is going to require no maintenance and will continue to work for many years to come. The wan to lan throughout on routers these days far surpasses what VM are going to be able to give you for the next 5 years or so so you/he won't have to worry about replacing anything. It is a sound investment in performance and enhancing your quality of life and once it is done that is it; it is a one time charge.

If you want a router for the £50 mark go for either of the ac1200 variants on those links.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I promise you, your problem is a problem local to yourself. I guarantee you that your issue is not something Virgin can solve and if it's not a torrent that one of your housemates has got going, then either someone is using your connection without your knowledge, someone's PC (possibly more than one) is a zombie in a botnet or there's just a lot of wireless interference nearby.

This is why Virgin tells you to try via a wired connection, to rule out wireless as being a problem. Wireless is incredibly flaky and there's no way for Virgin to guarantee any level of service wirelessly. This also means switching to BT or upgrading your connection isn't going to help. You're on the right track buying a new router, but I implore you to do some more testing to determine where the true issue lies before spending any money.

Step one: You need to do a wired test. You can't get around this. You need to find out if it's wireless or not and frankly, it's almost certainly wireless that's the problem. However, you also need to make sure it's not your housemates causing the issue, either. The easiest way to do that is to perform your wired test with wireless on the hub disabled (and nothing else plugged in). You can push the button on the front of the hub to turn the wireless off. Easy peasy. Do that, do a speed test on a laptop wired into the hub and see what happens.

Still slow? Try another laptop, just to be sure. If it's slow, call Virgin and report a fault. That seems unlikely.

Getting your 30mbit? Okay, you've then assured that the problem is local. Now you need to find out if it's Wireless or a housemate. Put wireless back on, change the wireless password (to temporarily kick your housemates off), then do another speed test and try some gaming. If it's still ******, wireless is the issue and you either need a better router or to invest in some decent powerlines, if not, your housemates are the issue.

Now assuming your housemates are the issue, you now just need to figure out if one of them is doing something stupid (torrent, virus, etc.) or if it's simply too much traffic. A quick way to determine this is to just look at the wireless light when nobody's home and you're trying to game. If it's flashing a lot then traffic is going through it.

All that said and done, 30meg is not enough for a 7 person household. It's just not in this day and age.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I did realise I had a twin ;) The world is very lucky

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Another option: having put the SH into modem mode, connect it to the router (located in your room) with a cat5e cable. Connect your PC to the router with a cable. Your housemates will benefit as well as the wireless router will be closer to them.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

This is probably the first thing he should have done.

---------- Post added at 10:00 ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 ----------

It'll tell you what the problem is.

---------- Post added at 10:01 ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 ----------

I've had the SH1 working over half a mile up.

---------- Post added at 10:03 ---------- Previous post was at 10:01 ----------

Given that doing the latter legally would cost hundreds, possibly thousands, you can't be serious...

---------- Post added at 10:06 ---------- Previous post was at 10:03 ----------

That, and it does nothing about having a router or internet connection that cannot handle the load

Trust me, you can impede a wired connection.

Truth is if they get a professional contractor in to do the work chances are they'll try to sell them some enterprise networking kit along with it and refuse to fit a consumer router.

---------- Post added at 10:08 ---------- Previous post was at 10:06 ----------

Never mess with Kushan's promises.

Going from 3Mbps upstream to 20Mbps upstream and the highest upstream bufferring in the UK to the lowest, will help nomatter whose fault it is.

Agreed. 2.4Ghz wireless is bad enough. 2.4Ghz wireless over multiple floors shared with a dozen devices is practically unusable on even on a good day.

And a 50M ethernet cable is barely £10-15 on ebay.

The TBB graph will show that well enough on it's own.

I grew up with a 64Kbps connection in a 50-person household.

---------- Post added at 10:09 ---------- Previous post was at 10:08 ----------

Oh god, two of you?!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

I know, but I didn't want to over complicate things and in the context of what we were talking about wired connections are pretty much perfect compared to wireless on shub1.


yup, although this is a perfect opportunity to correct my typo, I missed "n't" off the end of did

or you could just get the one for £9 which I posted the link to on Amazon (maybe I am your twin as well)

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

ISDN? wow you must have had rich parents, that was expensive when the rest of us had 28000 modems, hitting around 2.3

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Lol, they really should make links stand out more! :p:

Mmm. Amazon Prime eligible, free next-day delivery if I order within 3.5 hours. It's gonna be dirt cheap quality at that price though.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

30MB is perfectly fine if you had a traffic shaper policy going... You may need a enterprise router/firewall for that though. Best thing to do is try by wire... I got sick of my connection 3 floors up! When the builders were doing the roof I got a Ethernet wire pulled up to my room and it has been bliss!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

If you have multiple people playing games that require 1-2Mbps upload each on a connection with a throttled upload of 1.05Mbps total, 30Mb is not perfectly fine.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

yeah, 30/2 sucks ass and I am only one person. I can guarantee in my house that while I am bumbling around doing stuff on my pc that someone else is playing a game in another room and someone else is streaming stuff on tv in another room. Things have moved on big time in the last couple of years and I used to get excited about 120mbits and 152 thinking it was ample juice, but now I am thinking about 300/20. I have always enjoyed having more than I need just so I have got the peace of mind that I know everything is going to work no problem. We'll probably be having this conversation about 1gbit in 2 years time.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Yeah the upload sucks... forgot about that!

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

30mb down and 2mb up between 7 people i would say is the problem.

If you are gaming and say 2 of your housemates start to stream ur upload would get near depleated and i wonder if this is the cause.

Re: Please Please help me :[
 

Oh, I didn't realise it was still 2Mbps up - I was assuming 3Mbps (10:1). At 2Mbps the throttled speed would be 0.7Mbp. I've seen modern shooters use burst to over 1.5Mbps upload with a single client.

Apparently my address, which didn't have a cab thus no FTTC, was originally planned for FTTP until BT decided to give up. So close to getting gigabit!

(Actually, FTTPoD would be dirt cheap for us as our property is about 40m from the nearest NGA node with nothing but grass between us, but alas FTTPoD has been put on indefinite hold).