Severe speed/connection problems
Hi James,
Thanks for the fast reply.
Hmm, that's interesting - I rebooted the router earlier this morning to see if it helped, and when I just checked my router was showing connection time of 1hr43m. Not sure why it didn't register as a disconnect/reconnect at that time. Maybe this is indicative of the problem?
I have now switched the router off for 1 minute, and on reconnecting see the some problems
I left the BT speedtester 15mins just to be sure, and it still doesn't complete.
Kind regards, Neil
Thanks for the fast reply.
Hmm, that's interesting - I rebooted the router earlier this morning to see if it helped, and when I just checked my router was showing connection time of 1hr43m. Not sure why it didn't register as a disconnect/reconnect at that time. Maybe this is indicative of the problem?
I have now switched the router off for 1 minute, and on reconnecting see the some problems
I left the BT speedtester 15mins just to be sure, and it still doesn't complete. Kind regards, Neil
Thanks Neil. I can see your new connection now 
Strange that your browing is still really sluggish. Can you try setting the MTU on your computer and router to 1430 to see if this helps at all?
You can use Dr. TCP to set the MTU on your computer (if it's XP or before).
http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
You may also want to try setting the rWin (receive window) which I'd suggest settng at 97300.
Strange that your browing is still really sluggish. Can you try setting the MTU on your computer and router to 1430 to see if this helps at all?
You can use Dr. TCP to set the MTU on your computer (if it's XP or before).
http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
You may also want to try setting the rWin (receive window) which I'd suggest settng at 97300.
I've changed MTU to 1430 on my main PC and router, and it doesn't help. I cannot change rWIN due to Vista's auto-tuning feature.
It hasn't helped
I don't think a change to the MTU setting would explain why running the BT test at http://www.speedtester.bt.com/ never finishes though?
The screenshot attached shows you where it stalls - it has been in that state for about 40mins.
Nothing has changed at my end recently, and until 48 hours ago all was fine, and has been for years.
It's not just that download speed tests are slow - data transfer just seems to pause at times e.g. type a URL into my browser, such as www.bbc.co.uk, hit return and then nothing happens for 20-30secs. Then the webpage begins to draw, but again it will draw a bit, then pause for 10-15secs. On the BT speed test website, it displayed half of the index page, then paused half way through the text - 20secs or so later it completed the page. The same happens with progress during speedtest downloads.
Some of this feels like timeouts.
Thanks again, Neil
It hasn't helped
I don't think a change to the MTU setting would explain why running the BT test at http://www.speedtester.bt.com/ never finishes though?
The screenshot attached shows you where it stalls - it has been in that state for about 40mins.
Nothing has changed at my end recently, and until 48 hours ago all was fine, and has been for years.
It's not just that download speed tests are slow - data transfer just seems to pause at times e.g. type a URL into my browser, such as www.bbc.co.uk, hit return and then nothing happens for 20-30secs. Then the webpage begins to draw, but again it will draw a bit, then pause for 10-15secs. On the BT speed test website, it displayed half of the index page, then paused half way through the text - 20secs or so later it completed the page. The same happens with progress during speedtest downloads.
Some of this feels like timeouts.
Thanks again, Neil
Hi James,
Testing on more PCs is not a problem
- I have 4 laptops and 3 desktops to choose from! I've tested this on both my main PCvand main laptop, and both exhibit exactly the some problem.
I've just tried it on a 2nd laptop, and it is the same. So 1 tower PC and 2 laptops are all exhibiting the same severe reduction is downloads speeds. I checked my speedtest logs, and the sign of a severe slowdown was actually early evening last night, and from then on I've only seen download speeds of a few hundred kb/s - earlier in the day I was seeing about 3Mb/s which is not as high as the 5-6Mb/s I normally see, but certainly not the severe problem I'm now seeing.
Interestingly 2 of the speedtests I have just tried failed to complete - the progess bar got to about 90%, but then never completed nor returned a download speed - it just hung there.
Thanks again, Neil
Testing on more PCs is not a problem
- I have 4 laptops and 3 desktops to choose from! I've tested this on both my main PCvand main laptop, and both exhibit exactly the some problem.I've just tried it on a 2nd laptop, and it is the same. So 1 tower PC and 2 laptops are all exhibiting the same severe reduction is downloads speeds. I checked my speedtest logs, and the sign of a severe slowdown was actually early evening last night, and from then on I've only seen download speeds of a few hundred kb/s - earlier in the day I was seeing about 3Mb/s which is not as high as the 5-6Mb/s I normally see, but certainly not the severe problem I'm now seeing.
Interestingly 2 of the speedtests I have just tried failed to complete - the progess bar got to about 90%, but then never completed nor returned a download speed - it just hung there.
Thanks again, Neil