Slow 10mb download speeds?

[garrettfromtheci]

I'm on virgin media and until today was on the 4mb package. It worked fine until it started crawling along at speeds of 120kb for over two days. After two calls to some unhelpful technical support people in india i decided screw it, i'll just upgrade to 10mb. Now i've upgraded my download speeds don't go above 1.5 mb! at first i thought it could be the modem not being able to handle it but when i was playing around in vista (i have a duel boot setup) download speeds went up to 7mb and 10 mb in vista safe mode.

So i'm a little dumbfounded about what to do. the ntl indian guys are pointing the finger at my computer manufacturer but i doubt this as it was working fine until a few days ago. Any ideas? I can't pay for these crappy speeds

By the way, here is a pic of my modem. I have know idea what make it is as it's unbranded.

(I'll be having a dust later )



-Thanks for reading.

[Druchii]

Have you installed a new firewall or anything recently?

[garrettfromtheci]

Nope, Went through all that with the tech guys.

[leexgx]

Mon, 28 May 2007 02:21:01 UTC

1st 512K took 15 ms = 34133.3 KB/sec, approx 281258 Kbps, 274.67 Mbps
2nd 512K took 16 ms = 32000 KB/sec, approx 263680 Kbps, 257.5 Mbps
3rd 512K took 0 ms = Infinity KB/sec, approx Infinity Kbps, Infinity Mbps
4th 512K took 16 ms = 32000 KB/sec, approx 263680 Kbps, 257.5 Mbps

love my results does not seem to work for me (did it one 2 pcs) (Infinity LOL )


http://www.speedtest.net/

try UK ones first then dublin

works fine here if both of them do not give you full speed check you modem speed as well (if thay give you 8MB+ then i consider that as fine for 10MB bb)
do make sure your not uploading on any other computers on your network as that does bother the download speed an bit

There have been issues with speed test sites and 10mb and 20mb.

Try following the directions in this post (one I made earlier), see if that helps.
Test

But in summary
most speedtest sites were ideally setup in mind to test 2mb connections however most have upgraded bandwith/backhaul capacity greatly to handle 8mb connections however very very few are equipped to test a 20mb connection.

How do you test your 'Actual' Maximum download speed?
Simple you need to open up more connections to your given source, in plain english this means: If you current speedtest @ peak time is lets say 3mbit and you subscribe to virgin media's XL product, then you need to open up 7 connections to your given source to ensure you download @ 20mb (3mbitx7 = 21mbit), I however recommend using 10 connections (threads) that way you ensure ample bandwith.

How do you do this?
Well for a single file simply use a download manager (2 are suggested below both of which are totally free), once you've installed your download manager make sure you tell it to open 10 connections (threads) that way your prepared to download @ full speed.

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org (very comprehensive download manager)
if you use firefox as your browser a much simpler option is downthemall: http://www.downthemall.net this automatically opens 10 connections and should give you full speed.

Which is the best site to download a test file from to test my speed?
http://fuller.zen.co.uk/test/ - just choose one of the 100mb test files (UK based)
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx
This site usually gives a very reliable high bandwith throughput and should show you your actual maxiumum download speed. Just choose one of the wmvhd clips from this page. (US Based however usually has plenty of bandwith)

[Rik]

At the end of the day, if your speeds are fine when using Safe Mode in Vista then the problem is not related to your VM line, its PC related.

Not very helpful, but this just proves your line is working fine.

It seems that after around a week of fixed speeds, the problems have started yet again, multiple speedtest sites confirm my **** 10mb speeds of less than 1mb

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:58:10 GMT

1st 512K took 3625 ms = 141.2 KB/sec, approx 1163 Kbps, 1.14 Mbps
2nd 512K took 1843 ms = 277.8 KB/sec, approx 2289 Kbps, 2.24 Mbps
3rd 512K took 6079 ms = 84.2 KB/sec, approx 694 Kbps, 0.68 Mbps
4th 512K took 7171 ms = 71.4 KB/sec, approx 588 Kbps, 0.57 Mbps

Overall Average Speed = approx 1184 Kbps, 1.16 Mbps

[garrettfromtheci]

Well, it's been fixed now. Here's what happend: Virgin media sent an engineer to my house, he adjusted some of the tcp settings which gave a small speed increase, but he said it was not fast enough, connected some sort of test equiment to the modem and unscrewed that small square thing connected to the back of the modem in my pic which he said was slowing me down, I now get between 3 and 10mb depending on the time of day. As said before if you get speed problems the best thing to do is download tcp optimiser http://www.speedguide.net/files/TCPOptimizer.exe and select optimise and allso slide the bar up to your max download speed. If you still have no luck call up virgin for a repairman. You may need something doing to your modem.

[anduin]

Also, if you are looking at websites with lots of pictures, do a google search for MaxConnectionsPerServer , pageloads are much nicer without waiting for all the images to load