My Chinese ADSL upgrade

Anchundan · 3 Nov 2006 at 04:47

Hi

I've been on 2MB ADSL since Christmas last year, in my apartment in China, and have been able to download things (using a download accelerator) at speeds up to 220kb/s, from sites in UK and sites in China. 220kb/s seemed to be the max.

I've just upgraded my ADSL line here from 2MB to 4MB, on 1st November, as remotely accessing computers in UK was quite sluggish. The company (CNC) have said the change should take effect within 24 hours.

Yesterday morning, approx. 20 hours later, the speed absolutely dropped, and I was only able to download the same files from a UK website at 35kb/s. It stayed the same until yesterday afternoon, when it eventually picked up to the usual 210 - 220 kbps download speed.

This morning it is still the same speed as before, as if my line hasn't been upgraded. The company do insist that it has been upgraded.

I've done a speed test, and these are the results :

My nearest testing server is in Hong Kong. But this seems to tell me that I'm still on my 2MB line.

Now, I have heard, from searching this forum, that in UK some changes don't take effect until 3 - 10 days after implementation. So - do you think this is the same in every country? Do you think I have to wait this amount of time to see any change, or to prove that my line has indeed been upgraded?

Also - I hear people talking about attenuation and SNR, but I have an ADSL modem connected to a wifi router. The router has a user-friendly menu system on 192.168.1.1 but doesn't show this information. I can't seem to access the modem.

I'd really appreciate it if anyone could clarify any of this for me!

plasmahal · 3 Nov 2006 at 06:20

Looking at that ip address, i say your using a buffalo router ????

If so, it doesn't support the facility to look at snr values and line attenuation.

I have emailed buffalo support and they told me this.

As for the other stuff in your post, sorry can't help but i wouuld've thought downloading stuff from the uk to china will lose a fair bit of speed, maybe.

mattbrown91 · 3 Nov 2006 at 07:01

We got upgraded from 2 meg to 8meg and now it is running at about 1.7 meg

tolien · 3 Nov 2006 at 08:56

Your modem's where you'd need to go to get either the current sync rate (which would obviously answer whether you'd been upgraded or not) or attenuation/SNR margin.

Anchundan · 5 Nov 2006 at 08:31

Thanks for the replies.

I tried to explain to my Chinese girlfriend that my connection still seemed to be 2MB, and it might be due to SNR or line attenuation, etc. (not easy to explain this as she doesn't speak English, and she's not computer literate!)

In the end, she phoned the company back a second time, and they told her they'd forgotten to change one of the cables over at their end! I rebooted the modem and router, and now my download speeds have absolutely jumped!

I don't really trust that speedtest.net page - I've been testing my downloads today from sites in China, and sites in UK, and I'm definately running twice as fast as before, but that speed test page thinks I'm running slower?

Anyway, I'm extremely happy now. My 4MB (uncapped) line is costing me the equivalent of just under £10 per month. Unfortunately, 4MB seems to be as fast as I can get here.

MAllen · 5 Nov 2006 at 17:41

For accuracy, you will need a speedtest page in China. As local to you as possible. At least on your side of the plant. Otherwise all your testing will be affected by each hop en-route and only report the slowest point in the chain.

Best way of doing a speed test is find a big file hosted by your ISP and download it from their FTP server using a decent FTP client. Here in the UK I used to do tests by downloading a big file from Demon's FTP server.