Really unreliable internet connection

Soldato
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,084
Location
Gloucestershire
First of all here are the stats:

Connection Speed 2270 kbps 1056 kbps
Line Attenuation 40.0 db 2 7.5 db
Noise Margin 6.90 db 7.0 db

Router is a netgear DG834Gv5

Now that connection speed of 2270 is generally an evening speed, during the day time it can connect up to 3056 or so, but generally just over 3000 is a maximum of the past 3 months. 3 years ago you could get 3-4mb constantly here, this is just standard BT broadband by the way.

I have no wired phone to do a line noise test but i have tried the test socket and connection speed goes up by about 200kbps using the test socket over the norm.

The problems this causes: Online gaming, my primary hobby, becomes useless during peak times as even though my ping will be fine (40-50ms or there abouts) all games will lag and jerk about, almost as if there is really bad packet loss, and on occasion drop out completely. General browsing also slows down or fails to load the page occasionally.

First question then: Would a better router cope with the unreliable connection better or would i just be wasting my money?

Second question: I don't want to ring BT and go through the 20 questions of someone reading off a sheet, is there any way to avoid this and just get to someone who knows what they're talking about? Any tricks you lot have learnt for things to say and so on?

Third question: in combination to the above, does anyone have any idea what the root cause of this could be? I'm thinking the areas just over subscribed but am i having a laugh by expecting BT to fix that?
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jul 2009
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Location
Llanelli
BT use traffic shaping techniques to allow everyone to get the most from their connection. This usually means no one gets a good experience. 2700 Mbps is plenty for playing games.

You should be seeing faster speeds too. 40 attenuation should be good for 6 Mbps +
 
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KIA

KIA

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Wired or wireless?

Run WinMTR against your favourite server while you game. Post the log.
 
Associate
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17 Jan 2003
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Can you post the detailed stats from the router

You should be syncing MUCH higher (I am on 63Db and synch at 3300-3500)
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
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Posts
16,084
Location
Gloucestershire
Wired or wireless?

Run WinMTR against your favourite server while you game. Post the log.

Wired, i'll make sure to run that this evening (bet it doesn't do it this evening :p)

Can you post the detailed stats from the router

You should be syncing MUCH higher (I am on 63Db and synch at 3300-3500)

Will do, though this router doesn't seem to log things like errors, unless i'm missing something in there?

And i agree it is stupid that im only getting 2.2mb on a 40 attenuation, like i say a fair while back it was 4mb stable minimum, wish there wasn't a stupid contract on the line else i wouldn't even be on BT!

EDIT: would having BT vision, even if not in use, affect the line performance? Perhaps something BTs setup for that? My parents had BT vision previously but i gave them a sky plus box to replace it as it was crap.
 
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Soldato
OP
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16,084
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Gloucestershire
Ok i ran winMTR against my friends counter strike source server at the same time as my friend ran it, he got no loss at all and i get this....
winmtr.png


Doesn't look good.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,084
Location
Gloucestershire
Just tried the same thing using a BT home hub:
|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| BThomehub.home - 0 | 131 | 131 | 1 | 61 | 100 | 39 |
| 217.32.140.68 - 0 | 131 | 131 | 11 | 11 | 13 | 12 |
| 217.32.140.30 - 40 | 51 | 31 | 0 | 17 | 48 | 13 |
| 213.120.161.26 - 59 | 39 | 16 | 0 | 14 | 36 | 12 |
| 217.32.26.22 - 52 | 43 | 21 | 0 | 13 | 38 | 12 |
| 217.32.26.178 - 52 | 43 | 21 | 0 | 14 | 39 | 12 |
| acc1-10GigE-0-7-0-6.bm.21cn-ipp.bt.net - 52 | 43 | 21 | 0 | 14 | 40 | 12 |
| core1-te0-4-0-4.ealing.ukcore.bt.net - 81 | 31 | 6 | 0 | 26 | 56 | 56 |
| peer3te0-0-5-0.telehouse.ukcore.bt.net - 81 | 31 | 6 | 0 | 24 | 49 | 49 |
| linx.killercreation.co.uk - 81 | 31 | 6 | 0 | 67 | 202 | 50 |
| rt-2-cent.killercreation.co.uk - 81 | 31 | 6 | 0 | 27 | 54 | 54 |
| server.killercreation.co.uk - 97 | 27 | 1 | 0 | 21 | 21 | 21 |
|________________________________________________|______|______|______|______|______|______|
WinMTR v0.92 GPL V2 by Appnor MSP - Fully Managed Hosting & Cloud Provider

A fair bit later in the evening but it appears worse than the netgear one

EDIT: also not that it really matters that stats from the BT home hub:

VPI/VCI 0/38
Type PPPoA
Modulation ITU-T G.992.3
Latency type Interleaved
Noise margin (Down/Up) 10.1 dB / 6.4 dB
Line attenuation (Down/Up) 45.5 dB / 27.8 dB
Output power (Down/Up) 0.0 dBm / 12.8 dBm


EDIT: that's interesting, i disabled "port scan and DoS protection" on my netgear router, and i'm now getting no loss what so ever on WinMTR, though somehow i don't think that's going to have confirmed anything other than the fact that it was blocking the winmtr program :p
 
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Soldato
OP
Joined
7 Jun 2003
Posts
16,084
Location
Gloucestershire
ADSL Link-----------Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed---2270 kbps----1063 kbps
Line Attenuation-----39.5 db------27.0 db
Noise Margin--------11.05 db------6.5 db

So still having issues even though winMTR had no packet loss, speed is absolutely dire when i compare it to people of similar attenuations so decided i'd bump this and see if i could get any other suggestions?
 
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