Line Stats Check

Psymonkee · 29 Jan 2012 at 19:24

Hey,

Just jumped from O2 to Sky Broadband for money saving reasons and the connection is rather disappointing to say the least. It occasionally connects at the same kind of speed that O2 used to but the ping and speed tests come in much, much lower.

Pings in games aren't much better - the other day I was playing Left 4 Dead 2 with a ping of 110ms which really wasn't fun

Anyway quick picture of connection stats - do these look ok?

As for speedtest results we regularly come in just under 7Mb/s, occasionally hit 8Mb/s and sometimes drop down to 3Mb/s. It seems to be utterly random with no obvious bearing on anything at all.

Tealc · 29 Jan 2012 at 19:32

You might want to ask Sky to put you on a gamer profile which will shave 20ms or so off your ping time. If you do a ping to something like bbc.co.uk and get 50-60ms then you need to do this. If you get <30-35ms then it's already in place. Sky always set the lines to interleaved for better stability and this adds a small delay to the transmission of 8ms to 32ms, depending on the setting.

As for the bandwidth issues. I must admit I'm not a big fan of these speedtest sites. I much prefer to download something from a decent site and have a look at the speed I get. Just choosing a different server on speedtest, for me, had a massive difference in the results.

InQ · 29 Jan 2012 at 20:34

Your sync speed does seem a little low for 32dB line attenuation and 8dB noise margin but i guess there is nothing you can do about that assuming you connected during daylight hours (mine is 37dB and at 7dB noise margin i synced at just over 10Mbps).
Not sure what Sky's default target noise margin is but could be 9dB looking at that assuming those stats are from syncing in the evening.
As Tealc said do a ping test to bbc.co.uk (ping -n 10 www.bbc.co.uk) in a command prompt window.
Mine is circa 15ms when i'm wired to the router, a couple of ms higher via wifi.

Have you got a filter in the master socket or is it on the end of any extension?
There might be room for a higher sync if your internal wiring isnt optimally configured.

Psymonkee · 29 Jan 2012 at 21:12

coming in at around 56ms ping there so looks like a phone call to support is in order...

InQ · 29 Jan 2012 at 21:30

Looks like your on Interleaved then. On interleaved and via wifi mine was about 32ms so changing it to Fastpath nearly halved it.

(on TalkTalk LLU with a reseller called XILO).

Tealc · 29 Jan 2012 at 22:39

Sky won't do fastpath apparently but they will reduce that 50+ down to 20+ which is perfectly fine.

Sky's default SNR is 7dB an you are already close to that so I reckon at the moment you aren't going to get much more sync speed than you have. There might be things you can do though, such as plug in the master socket, remove run wire, remove extensions.

If you have several telephone extensions and things all plugged in they may be introducing noise on the line. Plug into the test socket and see if the figures you posted change at all. You may get lower Attenuation or higher SNR.