Hi folks. The usual story, speed really poor. Unfortunately my exchange (Haverton Hill, near Stockton on Tees / Middlesbrough) is an old style with no immediate prospect of being upgraded, plus I'm quite a way from it, so there's no real point in changing providers, bar going to Virgin cable. Both Be and o2 (now Sky) have given me the 'sign up to be told when we'll be able to give you service' response. Generally the Orange service in these terms is adequate. But the last week or so, it's been terrible.
The PC is connected by wireless, and always gives a good to excellent signal.
The problems seem to be manifested in two particular ways: one is downloading e-mails which seems to just hang on any large (over 1mb) mail; I get the 'pop server has not responded in 30 seconds' message after about five minutes where nothing is happening - no activity on the Livebox or on the PC . The only option other than retrying several times is to go into webmail and delete the offending mail or read on line. There's no problem with accessing the mail this way, bar the enormous volumes of spam that my client filters that has to be waded through.
The second is in downloading large files (>10mbs) on the PC from somewhere like Rapidshare. They start, give a speed of about 3kbps, offer a time taken to compete somewhere in the region of a short ice age, and tick over at that sort of speed, never even reaching 1% complete. The only option is to cancel the download which is a pain in the proverbial and obviously one of the things that I need to do with my internet connection. This makes me wonder whether I've been capped, but I've had no official word from Orange to say I have. This also sometimes happens with (for example) a YouTube video, which will start downloading and then crawls extremely slowly.
The funny thing is, most everything else seems OK / acceptable. Web browsing is its usual 'some pages take a time to load, some don't' speed (although I never can seem to load the Orange home page without several refreshes, oh the irony). I run an Xbox off a cabled connection (I am not paying Microsoft £60 for an unreliable wireless bridge) and that happily downloads game demos at reasonable speeds - it did a 100mb game in about 20 minutes the other day.
This has also all seem to have started since the latest updates from Microsoft were applied to my XP system last week (I have auto update on) but I've been unable to find anything on anyone else having similar problems.
So, I'd be grateful for any views. My opinion on the mail one is that my account is drowning in spam which never helps, but there has been a problem with the Orange mail servers which for whatever reason is causing problems with larger files. However the longer it goes on, the less likely this seems - surely they'd get it fixed?
The download one, my paranoia tells me that Orange are (effectively) blocking my access to sites like Rapidshare - the large file sharing networks. I am not saying I'm whiter than white , but as a musician I use these sites to swap large files with friends so that we can collaborate on this or that song.
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, but as a musician I use these sites to swap large files with friends so that we can collaborate on this or that song.
