Broadband Patchy and Intermittent

[#1]

Hi,
Hope some one can help. I've been having issues with my ADSL broadband and its been intermittent and patchy. I've changed the router to a brand new TPLink unit but that didn't help.

Speed test results below:
http://www.speedtest.net/
Ping: 68ms
Download Speed: 3.36Mbps
Upload Speed: 0.40Mbps
I've also used BT test site: http://www.speedtest.btwh...ceTesterWS/diagnostics.do
Here are results;
Download speed achieved during the test was - 4.51 Mbps
Upload speed achieved during the test was - 0.31Mbps
Ping Test was - 39.63ms
Do I need a reset?
Thanks

[#2]

Your line looks fine, there have been no disconnections for over 9 days.
The download speed of 4.5Mb/s is around what I'd expect for your profile of 5Mb/s and is exactly in the middle of your estimate range.
When you say patchy and intermittent, what exactly is the issue you're seeing?

[#3]

Thanks for the reply.
The Internet is just painfully slow, lots of buffering, we can rarely watch Netflix or TV on our iPad. Even trying to watch a YouTube video is painful and I normally give up and use my 3G on my phone.
We have to reset it at least once a day, sometimes more. This sometimes helps a little bit but doesn't make a huge difference.
We have also experienced problems trying to go on Facebook or send whatsapp messages, and get connection errors on both applications often.
Any suggestions?
EDIT: I should add, this is with various devices, phones, laptops, all the same performance.

[#4]

Question for Plusnet, - would errors and disconnections at the DSL level always show up in the Radius logs?
For the customer,  what exactly is it that you have to reset at least once a day?  Are you 100% sure you don't have problems within your own network, whether that be wireless or wired?

[#5]

Hi aesmith,
We're having to reset the router. The internet used to be fine, its only in the last few months we've had a problem. We are using wireless connections generally, but as I said we recently changed out the router to a brand new unit and the performance is exactly the same (poor).

[#6]

Cheers.  That's odd.  You're resetting the router, but Plusnet see it as online without a break.  Could you try a test just on the offchance, next time before resetting check with a cable direct into the router to see whether that works.  We had a period where we appeared to lose Internet, cleared by rebooting the router (a flakey old Linksys) but when I investigated it was only the wireless that was failing.
Can you post your line statistics?  Someone could give instructions, but we'll need to know what model router you have.
You ping times look OK on the speed test, maybe a bit slow but nothing drastic.  Could you also try some manual pings when the link is "bad"?  From Windows command prompt "ping ntp.plus.net" and "tracert ntp.plus.net".
Raising a fault with Plusnet would make sense as well, they'll pull all your account settings and line test data into the ticket.

[#7]

Aesmith, thanks for the advice, how do I get my line stats? My router is a TP-LINK TD-W8960N.
I'll give the wired option a go and raise a fault ticket as well.

[#8]

According to a quick Google, it should from the main menu under Device Info / Statistics / xDSL.

[#9]

Quote from: frazell

We have to reset it at least once a day, sometimes more.

What are you resetting? The wireless on the router, the whole router? Something else?
Here's the connection logs from our side:

And the BTWholesale tests aren't showing any disconnections either, so the router doesn't appear to be disconnecting.

[#10]

Switching off the entire router and the wall socket, wait 2 mins and then turn it back on.

[#11]

I've just checked on the BTWholesale testing again, and the last initialisation on the line was on the 24th Oct. Could you try turning the router off for 30 minutes?

[#12]

Hmm, interesting that there was no further update
I see this never got remarked on

Quote from: aesmith

..........would errors and disconnections at the DSL level always show up in the Radius logs?

The answer is errors don't show up in Radius logs (at least not connection errors such as ES/CRC/HEC etc). Failures to authenticate etc probably do IIRC.
As for Disconnections at the DSL level, ha, now that is a bit more complicated. The simple answer is not always.
If a disconnection doesn't cause a loss of PPP session, then it won't show up in the logs, perhaps that's rather obvious. A user can often tell that there has been no loss of PPP session if their IP address has not changed (unless on a fixed IP address) and/or if their Gateway hasn't changed - however even if the PPP session has dropped/been dropped, reconnection might still be to the same Gateway, it's not too uncommon.
We are aware that short losses of sync which are triggered by a momentary loss of Upstream sync frequently do not cause loss of the PPP session. This could be caused by very strong interference/noise affecting the Upstream (but having little or no effect on the Downstream) or of course, some sort of fault. If when sync is re-established, there's been no change in downstream sync speed, one has to dig into the xDSL data to find such an event.