Ducati 996

OK Broadband guys, see if you can help me out here....

Scenario..... Blueyonder home install (basically Set top box - cat5 - PC).

I've had a couple of teething problems, had them out a few times, massive amount of noise on the line, which has been rectified.... ????

Anyway, put a router in place, no noticable difference in performance, I ran said speed tester, I was getting 523K average. Then this week everything seemed to slow down. I unplugged the router and STB, connected a PC directly, switched everything back on, and re-ran the tests, pretty much the same, speed test down to 203K, and when downloading anything from a 2Mb to a 80Mb file it gets so far then stalls, I've not been able to get any emails with attachments either.

So the router is back in place, same thing, I called Telewest to report a problem, the guy treats me like I've never touched a PC, I tell him my setup, oh routers aren't supported, I explained it's the same without the router, he then asks me to "click start, then run, type cmd, at the command prompt, ping....." you get the picture, I explain that a ping isn't a true judge of speed, which he didn't like one bit....

I then asked about their proxies, and if they might be caching the pages etc, he wouldn't deny or confirm this.... I say I'll unplug everything and put it back to the setup without the router, but he won't hold, even though it's taken me 20 minutes to get through...

So I hang up, put it back to it's original config, and low and behold everything is flying again.... Mmmmm..... I get a feeling they've done something, not had chance to put the router back in the loop yet, but it has been working....

Any ideas.... ?

krankyd

Telewest do to proxy caching. Basically they funnel all http / https traffic through a transparent proxy, even if you have no proxy configured.

This was causing a problem about 6-7 months ago, as a load of people had code-red virus's installed on their pc's which were making thousands of http / https connections to random IP addresses. This resulted in the transparent proxy machines being very overloaded!

Try manually adding in another external proxy (as I was advised by the telewest staff, proxy.bt.com, proxy.demon.net, etc) and see if the speed is any better....

Mabey there was some mis-configuration on the router? I have heard of some people who have very small black-box devices that can get overloaded with a fast internet connection... try upgrading the router's firmware?

Ducati 996

Krankyd,

I thought as much, my router is a brand spanker (D-Link DI-604), and the first thing I did was upgrade the firmware, I'm going to put it back in the loop over the weekend and see if I see any loss again.

I'll have to find out what proxies BY use, and see if there are any alternatives

MarkO

Here at work I get: Your raw speed was 1107521.79 bits per second which is the same as: 1.1 megabits per second. 1MB file download - 7.6 seconds. Not bad, I guess.

krankyd

>>Here at work I get: Your raw speed was 1107521.79 bits per second which is the same as: 1.1 megabits per second. 1MB file download - 7.6 seconds. Not bad, I guess.

git
Wish I was still working at the datacenter for exodus. T1 line came out into a 24 port switch that was only for the use of the consultant staff..


mmmm. bandwidth...

MarkO

A guy I know just tried it and got 70mb/s.

ChrisB - can you guess who it was?