Slow speeds on 10meg connection

Danny_Wasp · 12-04-2007, 23:18

Greetings all!

Absolutely extatic to be connected to 10meg cable earlier today, I've been dreaming of downloading the internet at night - came back down to earth with a bang when downloads were only going at 200k/sec.

Hmmm, somethings up me thinks. I _know_ there isn't anything on my computer, working as a systems engineer for a digital agency tends to make you paranoid about system security as its drummed into you 24/7 (well, 8/5 actually ;o) ). Anyway, i digress, running various speed tests resulted in speeds from 1.1meg to 1.8meg.
Downloading files from Microsoft, Apple and various other sites (all have oddles of spare bandwidth) to max my connection resulted in never going past 245k/sec. I've been monitoring this with an app i've downloaded.

I'm located in the AL area and I couldn't see any official announcement on the Virgin Media site.

If this was adsl I'd know what to do and where to go, BT have an offical speed test that when you run it, its logged from there end as proof that things are bad, after googling for a while I'm starting to get the impression that ntl Virgin Media have no such facility.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Is anyone else having the same issues in the area?

I'm a little reluctant to call customer services, my welcome letter wasn't included in the information pack so no pin to activate the service. I called, spoke to the person on the other end and noticed that the name on the account was spelt incorrectly, he said he changed it, read it out again and it was still wrong. He said he couldn't change it more than once and i'd need to speak to tech support, after that he dumped me back to the start of the main menu. Very nice of him.

I'm really hoping this is teething issues but i'm starting to get a sinking feeling that i should have stuck with adsl.

<end rant>

Dan

Druchii · 13-04-2007, 00:20

You could try using a dwnload manager to open more threads to servers to see if you can push past 245KB/s. If using Firefox i'd recommend Flashget extension. Personally however i just use Orbit Download Manager. Speedtests and one thread tell me i'm on about 4 - 6Mb, but my download manager pulls 10Mb night and day.

Hope this may help slightly, and good luck with getting it sorted.

dinje · 13-04-2007, 00:35

those two sites you mentioned are notoriously slow..not a good example, i'm afraid.

try grabbing something from newsgroups... usually maxes me out.

Richy99 · 13-04-2007, 20:07

and have you checked your modem stats to make sure it is 10 meg?
are you using arouter or is it plugged into the pc directly?
did you try other sites at all?

Danny_Wasp · 14-04-2007, 14:23

MS.com is a brilliant site to download from, they have loads of spare bandwidth.

After trawling the internet for fixes/tips/hints and doing various speed tests and never seeing a speed over 245k/sec, i called ntl. Mentioned I was suffering from slow speeds - after going through several pointless tests (clearing temp internet files/cookies on IE, even after saying i never touch it, FF all the way) I explained the tests that i'd been doing (downloading from many places at once). Support guy said that when your on 2meg your not going to be able to go over those kind of speeds.

2meg i said? I think we could have found the problem, popped through to customer services, confirmed i was on 2meg changed to 10. Now downloading from MS at 1000k+/sec.

Bloody marvelous!

Cheers to all for the repsonses and advice, I'm now going to start downloading teh interweb.

---------- Post added at 14:23 ---------- Previous post was at 14:21 ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Druchii

You could try using a dwnload manager to open more threads to servers to see if you can push past 245KB/s. If using Firefox i'd recommend Flashget extension. Personally however i just use Orbit Download Manager. Speedtests and one thread tell me i'm on about 4 - 6Mb, but my download manager pulls 10Mb night and day.

Hope this may help slightly, and good luck with getting it sorted.

I was using Internet Download Manager to download 3 files at once, all files split into 2 parts, again downloading at once.

Am doing the same now and can hardly contain my grin

Hex · 14-04-2007, 14:41

Another couple of months and that grin should double when they finish rolling out 20mb.

nicke261192 · 14-04-2007, 14:47

If it is going slow i would either say:

Your modem cannot support this speed (unlikely)

Wait a while as it took my connection a week to settle when i upgraded

If you are connecting via your STB then you wont get 10Mbit