Stumbled across this website and read some very interesting topics and wonder if anyone could just give me a small bit of advice.
Been with Orange since the Dial-Up Freeserve days and thought I was running 2mb BB for £17.99 per month with 2gb cap although they tell me I am on 8mb now - I never asked for the upgrade either.
Anyway last month and a bit on and off I keep getting disconnected in the evening especially Sundays but thought it was just an outage and stuff but now it has been more regular and started to annoy me.
If I call the morons and yes they really are morons in India (it's not a racist slur just they are not trained) they tell me about using Speedtouch all the time (I use a Linksys Wireless Gateway) and at the end of the call which I'm paying for tell me to wait an hour or see wot is is like the next day.
So rant over, now done to the question - I use a Linksys ADSL gateway and during the day I can easily get 2mb connection - I've been working from home due to a broken collarbone and done the speedtest stuff.
Evenings however are a different story - was getting outages every other day so spoke to UK cust service who put me thru to someone who did a line test and said there is a LLU fault asked how I was then getting broadband (I was speaking to them thru my works VOIP) and then said they would get someone to look into it.
Since then I've not been getting disconnections but in the evening the speed sucks - did speed test and getting only around 384k download tops but full upload 256k.
Is the same this morning as well so went into my router and got the following.
DSL Status: UP
DSL Modulation Mode: GDMT
DSL Path Mode: FAST
Downstream Rate: 6528 Kbps
Upstream Rate: 288 Kbps
Downstream Margin: 6 db
Upstream Margin: 31 db
Downstream Line Attenuation: 44
Upstream Line Attenuation: 23
Downstream Transmit Power: 0
Upstream Transmit Power: 0
Can someone be so kind as to tell me what the above means and is the speedtest.net accurate.
Also anything I can go back to Orange and tell them that might ring some bells.
Thanks in advance, sorry for the length of the post
Is the same this morning as well so went into my router and got the following.
DSL Status: UP
DSL Path Mode: FAST
Downstream Rate: 6528 Kbps
Upstream Rate: 288 Kbps
Downstream Margin: 6 db
Downstream Line Attenuation: 44
Can someone be so kind as to tell me what the above means and is the speedtest.net accurate.
Shows you're on an LLU line connected at 6 meg, margin is a is on the limit, least the disconnections have been cured. As for the speed, if you were getting slow speeds when you pulled those stats then there's clearly some sort of bottleneck at some point in the system.
Speedtests are just guides, you shouldn't trust them 100% so use a couple of different ones and see if they roughly agree. Can be better to use actual performance downloading a file or two.
Shows you're on an LLU line connected at 6 meg, margin is a is on the limit, least the disconnections have been cured. As for the speed, if you were getting slow speeds when you pulled those stats then there's clearly some sort of bottleneck at some point in the system.
Speedtests are just guides, you shouldn't trust them 100% so use a couple of different ones and see if they roughly agree. Can be better to use actual performance downloading a file or two.
Thanks Elhana
What do you mean "margin is on the limit"?
Also this weekend the speed has slowed to around 112kbps (twice as fast as dialup) and I'm getting sick of it.
Regarding speedtests - which are the best one's to use and do Orange recognise any of them?
Any other advice would be fantastic as I need some ammo to shout at them about.
Best thing is to pick 2 or even 3 speedtest sites and make a note of the results, if they all confirm the same thing is just adds more weight to them being correct.
It's generally considered that noise margin should be over 6db, less and you being to lose the signal and start getting disconnections. Sometimes the margin needs to be set higher for more stability depending on the specific situation.
Best thing is to pick 2 or even 3 speedtest sites and make a note of the results, if they all confirm the same thing is just adds more weight to them being correct.
It's generally considered that noise margin should be over 6db, less and you being to lose the signal and start getting disconnections. Sometimes the margin needs to be set higher for more stability depending on the specific situation.
Thanks Elhana
I will try Speedtest and ThinkBroadband again at various times of the day.
Regarding noise margin - is this something I can change or is it an Orange thing?
Also just done a speed test this morning and look at the speed although this is still not the 6mb they say I can get - can u confirm what this is the equivalent to please.
To be honest I would be okay if it was this speed all the time but I know this will drop again this evening.
The fact is that with Orange LLU you are only ever likely to get a max download speed of 2.7 Mb no matter what your sync speed is. Basically the kit they have installed at exchanges all over the UK is c**p.
As you were put on their 8 Meg service without you asking, and if you are outside of your 12 month Orange contract, then I suggest you move to another ISP.
The fact is that with Orange LLU you are only ever likely to get a max download speed of 2.7 Mb no matter what your sync speed is. Basically the kit they have installed at exchanges all over the UK is c**p.
If you check the LLU speeds thread you'll see that speeds have changed for a number of people so they can get well over 2.7meg.
Wackojackouk
Don't worry about the noise margin, I was more just commenting on it really. Apart from checking your home wiring there's not much you can do to effect it directly. I believe you can change it's target value with some routers but I really don't know much about that and it's more for preventing disconnections.
1 meg is roughtly 1000kbps. So that test got 1.8 meg.
Slow connection speeds on Orange's LLU network in certain exchanges at particular times are already a known problem (and have been for some time). I think it's related to too many connections to the DSLAM in an exchange, which at peak times can create a temporary overload. This means that the speed rates of all the connected lines can become temporarily affected, which can then cause disproportional connection speeds, when compared against a line's particular aggregate upstream / downstream ratio.
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