Tag: broadband

Broadband woes

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Anyone got any idea about this one?

Our broadband has been absolutely fine since we had a BT engineer come and update our master socket and lay a new extension cable a few months ago.

But suddenly, even though the router reports being connected at speeds of between 3Mb and 4MB, every broadband speed test reports 128 Kbps or very close to it. (In a reversal of the normal position we can upload on the speed tests at a little over twice that rate!) Web pages seem veeery slow.

I’ve swapped to a different router with the same result. I’m a bit perplexed.

EDIT: BT’s speedtester Best Effort Test:
Your DSL connection rate: 4480 kbps(DOWN-STREAM), 448 kbps(UP-STREAM)
IP profile for your line is – 135 kbps
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was – 123 kbps

So I’m thinking something has caused BT to re-profile our line as REALLY SLOW. If so, I think I’m right in saying it’ll improve after 72 hours if our sync speed stays high. I think.

EDIT 2: Yay! All fixed and speeds back up to normal. Apparently if there is a large percentage improvement in ADSL sync speed BT will revise your speed upwards in 5-6 hours instead of 72 hours. I have to assume this is what happened today, since the connection was moving like a broke-legged donkey until lunchtime and has now sprung into normal speeds again.

The internet is broken again

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Gah! I keep getting emails from my ISP telling us we’re x amount over our website’s daily bandwidth allowance, and as a result our entire website has been taken down (or ‘archived’) until I apologise and agree to play nicely.

Some of you may remember the incident in which Dan Hartland ate our website after I naively hosted a large video of him on the Gadget show (now to be found here instead.) It’s like that.

Except, it isn’t. I’d love to be that popular, but without Dan’s special brand of internet charisma working for us there’s just no way our humble site of photographs is exceeding 250 MB of traffic a day. (Even allowing for the fact that I store all my LJ files and pictures there.) After checking our webstats we do indeed seem to be below 250 MB a day, despite emails telling us we’re up to 150MB OVER that limit.

I’ve raised it with the ISP who responded as follows: “We have seen a few reports of sites being archived for going over the bandwidth allowance when it appears they haven’t. I have added your account to the open problem so we can check and confirm this further so the alert may well be in error.”

So, okay, maybe if they knew it was happening they could have let everyone know, but that’ll do in a pinch. Or it would, if we hadn’t received yet another email this morning, and if our site hadn’t been archived yet again. Once more we seem to be within our limit, and it’s very frustrating. We do keep resisting moving from plus.net because I don’t want the hassle of changing our website’s domain, but I’m seriously thinking about getting it hosted elsewhere.

EDIT 24/2/08: “Dear Mr Clark, I have restored your site. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, this problem should be fixed now so hopefully it won’t happen again.” Hurray!