What's the likelihood of this being the router?

[antonusklesk]

Long-story short I'm going through process of troubleshooting my BB connection with Sky.

I've had a rock-solid connection of 13mb for years, and in the last day or so it's become unsteady with the connection downstream and upstream fluctuating between 1.6mb and 5mb.

I've been through all the normal tests with microfilters, test socket, BT say the line is working fine etc, and I'm beginning to believe that Sky will soon say that it's likely to be the router that's causing it and advise that I replace it with a new one.

I've not had much experience with routers going bust but how likely is it that the large drop in speed and constant fluctuations could be caused by the router being dodgy, and thus being fixed with a new one?

I only ask because I'd like to know how much to push Sky to test the line in every way possible before going down the new router....route.

 

[bremen1874]

You appear to have excluded the most obvious possible causes.

Presumably you're testing using a wired connection to the router?

I believe that Sky's T&Cs require you to use their equipment, so if necessary they should be providing you with a replacement router.

It’s probably worth you providing the connection information from the router (attenuation, noise margin, etc.) to see if there’s an obvious problem.

 

[antonusklesk]

Sorry yes I'm using a wired connection to the router.

I've left RouterStats monitoring the connection overnight and it seems to have settled down somewhat, stopped bouncing around between 1.6 and 5mb and settled on 6mb for nearly 12 hours now, but the Noise Margin is very high for the downstream as well. Currently I believe whatever was causing the problem may have disappeared and the low speed is due to the Noise Margin used to compensate for the fluctuations over the last day or so.

However this doesn't mean the problem has gone for good.

Here are the stats:

Port Status TxPkts RxPkts Collisions Tx B/s Rx B/s Up Time
WAN PPPoA 202897 363004 0 406 12318 10:53:42
LAN 10M/100M 350276 202926 0 11489 538 10:56:24
WLAN 11M/54M/108M 39419 24796 0 1320 39 10:56:17

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 5984 kbps 884 kbps
Line Attenuation 34.0 db 18.9 db
Noise Margin 23.7 db 8.0 db

-EDIT-

Well after all that everything seems back to normal. In the test socket I've got a solid 14.5mb and in an extension elsewhere in the house I'm getting 13.9mb. So my speed's gone up.

WIth it going back to normal Sky think there was something happing externally, either localised interference or BT doing some work on the exchange that affected the line.