Awful Speed, Awful Pings

sarthek · 26-04-2005, 20:56

For about four weeks now I've been suffering awful download rates, unreliable connections and truly awful pings with my NTL broadband system.

- Motorola Surfboard SB4100 Modem
- 2Mbps Connection
- 3 STBs
- Linksys WRT54G router
- Living in Guildford area

ADSLguide Test report:
Downstream - 151Kbps (18.9 KB/sec) - 163Kbps (inc. overheads)
Upstream - 21Kbps (2.6KB/sec) - 22Kbps (inc. overheads)

I have had the above setup for several years now and never experienced any problems with lag when gaming (most recently with World of Warcraft) or download rates until about a month ago.

At this point, although nothing in the network setup had changed, the connection became hugely unreliable, sometimes providing the level of performance I always used to have, sometimes being worse than a dial-up connection. Packets started getting lost left right and centre, I started suffering huge lag in games (as I'm typing this my ping time to Google averages at 1712ms) and my download rates are, on average, about 20KB/sec.

Since this started I've tried everything from bypassing the network completely and directly connecting to the modem to replacing the network hardware (twice), all to no avail. Occasionally, if I turn the modem off and on again the performance returns to a reasonable level for about half an hour, but that's the best I seem to be able to do and even this doesn't always seem to work.

I have phoned NTL about this several times now, and each time I've been fobbed off with lines ranging from "it seems OK our end" to "no, that's all you can expect from the connection speed you have" to "there's nothing we can do about it at the moment, call us back again next time you're having the problem."

Has anyone else suffered a similar degradation in service in the past month or so? If so, have you been able to resolve the problem? I really am at the end of my tether as far as this is concerned...

paulyoung666 · 26-04-2005, 21:01

hi and

to the site , try pm'ing one of the mods here

highlandlassie · 26-04-2005, 21:37

They told me the same and had me check out a few speed tests - when I gave them the results they confirmed I did have a problem - they turned something off for a couple of hrs and I am now back up to speed again

GreenGoblin · 28-04-2005, 19:25

Hmm.

Glad its all solved for you.

After 2 months now.. I'm still in the same position.

Bad pings and Packet loss.

Makes gaming imposible.

salem · 29-04-2005, 21:23

lo all .
for the first time ever i'm having major slow down with my connection.
i'm on 3 meg sacm, my ping is pretty poor on the gaming servers(anything between 80 to 450) and pages are taking an age to load.
can someone pop up the link to the speed test you use please.

thank yooooooo

Ignition · 29-04-2005, 21:52

Gentlemen, one person complaining of slow speeds then loads of others in various areas piling in doesn't help.

One issue one thread, a lot more chance of things getting sorted this way.

If you could do this it'd be a definite bonus too.

salem · 29-04-2005, 22:33

re your response and a line from your link>b) Speed issues: Please post at least one speed test which tests speed in both directions.

you will have noticed that i did not request help from you but simply asked if someone could post the link to the forums prefered speed test.
if this has caused you some distress then i apologise, as you can see from my member details i am not in the habit of posting on the forum for my own self gratification.
i will not trouble you with any further enquiries

s

Ignition · 29-04-2005, 22:37

http://www.adslguide.org.uk/tools/speedtest.asp for download and upload

Did I mention you specifically? No need to be oversensitive!

Generally complaining on a public forum in a section 'Broadband Support' implies you're looking for assistance.

sarthek · 29-04-2005, 23:15

You'll be glad to know you can disregard the above now.

Since posting an engineer has been spotted at the green-box (not hard to spot given that the box is at the end of my garden) and the speed has returned to sensible levels. Presumably this was to do with the planned maintenance this week that NTL warned of on their service status page.

That said, NTL still deny that there were ever any problems with my connection, but given that the return to full speed came soon after the engineer was seen working outside I'm inclined to believe that there was a problem of one form or another that they weren't owning up to on the support line.

jonifen · 30-04-2005, 00:08

At least its all back up and working as normal Sarthek... It could have been something as simple as a loose connection in the green-box which an engineer may have spotted while fixing something else.