Slow Downloads

[dancaswell]

Hi All

I am having some issues an I hope someone can help.

I am on NTL 2MB and all appears to work fine until i try and download anything held on my newsgroup (easynews)
Sometimes I will get around 220Kb-230kb my normal speed, but most of the time I get anywhere between 5kb-100kb.
This has only started happening since all the issues with NTL's proxies and only happens on easynews. all other sites works fine. I have spoken to easynews and we tested the path from them to me and found lutn-t2core-a-pos31.inet.ntl.com is dropping 60% of data packets sent to it. I have also spoken to NTL and given them my findings, but they are insistant there is no issue on their side of things and it myst be easynews at fault.
As far s I can tell easynews is OK as they can max out my works 20MB connection.
If it is any help my modem is connected via Ethernet to an Apple Airport Extreme basestation, with My PC connected to it via Ethernet and my iBook on the wireless.

Is anyone having the same type of issues with easynews or any other site?
Anyone have any ideas what I can do next?

Thanks

[IanUK]

Easynews is currently one of the sites that the proxies are affecting badly in many areas, there is a large thread about this in the easynews support group as you are probably aware.

Have you tried using a different port for your downloads (81) from the web.
Or using proxy.news.easynews.com for nntp using different ports ?

I found that manually changing my route made my NNTP downloads from Easynews using the standard port much better (http://members.easynews.com:81/route/) Level 3 and Qwest are the best from NTL in my area.

Hope that helps

Ian

As well as port 81, you could also use https or proper nntp - only http (tcp port 80) is intecepted by the web caches.

[dancaswell]

Thanks for the replies.
Changing to port 81/secure connection didn't help, but changing the route seems to have done the trick.

Thanks for the help