Virgin 50meg, DLink DIR-615 problems?

Daaaveee

Daaaveee

Daaaveee

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Joined
21 Feb 2006
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Hi all,

Had 50meg for a couple of month now, no problems at all with it.

Today however been having some issues with download speeds.

We have 2 PCs connected wired to it, and a laptop connected through wireless. Previously all have been getting the full bandwidth, however today only one of the PCs wired is getting full bandwidth, the other PC and laptop are getting around this speed, although it has varied from ~22 to 46, and even 50 once on each.



Yesterday we had another PC connected to it for 24 hours or so, downloaded a game from Steam and did some browsing/gaming with it, no problems there with it pulling 6mb/s from Steam. I'm not sure if this may have triggered anything although it shouldn't have?

So, any ideas of what might be wrong? I've heard the DIR-615 is pretty poor, is this causing issues? I've not done anything to it since it was installed.

Thanks for any help!
 
It's probably a mixture of being on wireless and the fact the DIR-615 isn't particularly good. It's really easy to make it choke and fall over. :p Shut down the laptop, turn off the cable modem. Plug the laptop directly into the modem, and start them both up (modem first, then the laptop). Carry out further speed tests and see what happens.

BTW the London server is preferable to others on VM due to their routing; other servers will likely not give you an accurate result. :) That said speedtest.net isn't exactly 100% reliable either. Do some real-world tests, either from Usenet (news.virginmedia.com), a known high-bandwidth FTP server, or add together the speeds of several simultaneous downloads over HTTP.
 
Daaaveee said:

[.img]
Working fine plugged strait in to the cable modem.

I read something about flashing the DIR-615, is this going to help?
Click to expand...

Not really. You can flash to stock firmware (v4.11 iirc) or else there's an experimental (and not fully working afaik) version of DDWRT. Provided the 615 gets rebooted every day or two it shouldn't cause too many problems. It sounds more like the wireless itself is the issue tbh.

Daft question (maybe), but you DO have a wireless N card in the laptop and not wireless G, right? The speeds you've been getting are pretty much what you'd expect from wireless G...
 
Yep the laptop has an N card, it was working as expected a few days ago, also my PC had the same problem and that was plugged in to the 615 with a cable, which is now working fine plugged into the modem instead.
 
Okay, maybe something more to it now.

Just testing newsgroups and the speed is down to 500-1000kb/s where I used to get 6000.

The provider I use gives 20 connections (Astraweb), however only 4-5 of these are actually downloading at one time, one might stop, and another start.

Also, now I am currently downloading from newsgroups and normal browsing is extremely slow.

Something up with the line then? I'm connected directly to the cable modem, as supplied by VM with the 50meg package a couple months ago, looks like this:

virgin-media-50mbps-modem-broadband.png
 
Ok not doing anything other than browsing now and its rediculously slow!

Managed to get Speedtest to respond:



The progress arrow was very erratic when it was in progress too.
 
Could be a fault then mate, yeah. If it's happened directly connected to the modem and over several protocols, you're likely looking at a borkage somewhere. :( Time to ring up tech support tbh.

What are your power levels and SNR etc for the downstream?
 
Here comes another spanner in the works, unplugged my PC, plugged in the GFs wired in to the modem again and no problems!

Pulling from Newsgroups at 6100+ kb/s, and:

 
Daaaveee said:
How can I check these?

Thanks for all your help thus far by the way!
Click to expand...

No problem. :) Go to http://192.168.100.1/ and click the Downstream link on the left. A screen-shot is probably easier/cleaner than cutting and pasting as there's a lot of info on there.

If only your PC is suffering the erratic speeds, and can't download from Usenet properly where your laptop/other PC/whatever are fine, it could be two unrelated issues. To my mind/experience, you're describing classic PIO mode on the hard drive, or some other hardware fault (RAM?). :(
 
Laptop was having problems which is when I first noticed it, then on my PC, and now the GFs is doing it too. Its so irratic, driving me crazy trying to source the problem.

Will try that now cheers.
 
Wow your power levels are a little low. On QAM256, the worst (widest) power levels you should see, while staying in-spec, are -3 to +7 dBmV or -4 to +6 dBmV (depending on which platform you're on).

You have -9.53 at worst, which could be what's causing your problems as that's massively under spec. Time to book that engineer! :D
 
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Ahh great glad to see something is wrong (strange but at least I know that is a problem now!)

Will get on to Virgin and report back, thanks a lot!
 
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