My Broadband speed has decreased?

Question

My broadband speed , I am with BT internet, has decreased the last couple of weeks from over 3mb to just 3 to 700 kb. I am sick and tired of speaking via email to Ranjit and his mates giving me all the old tests to do that I have done a thousand times, How do I get the BT engineers to check the line , as Ranjit ET AL seem to take no notice?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, most ISPs are going to try to stick it to you, as I don't think they guarantee speed.

www.dslreports.com/stest

You can run a speed test and compare with other people on your node of their network. This will let you know if you are slow, fast, or even in comparison to them.

Download a program called "activeports" - it's probably available from snapfiles.com. This will let you know if anything is running on your computer network connection unbeknownst to you that could be slowing you down.

You might read up a bit on MTU tweaks for windows - this will help your connection feel a bit snappier.

With the number of calls ISPs get daily because someones broken a wire, or burned up a nic, or have so much spyware running on their computer that it's crushing their connection - they're pretty apt to disregard complaints.

Change your complaint from "my connection is slow" to "My latency is so bad that I'm getting page cannot be displayed errors" "Constant pings to stable websites are dropping packets" "I'm sporadically losing connectivity - and it's creeping when it returns". These are keys to telling them "I know what I'm talking about and I have an actual problem"

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I have had similar problems when in touch with the BT help lines. The main difficulty is making sense of what they are saying because of the heavy accents. They are quite good at the fault finding etc but they are not too good on the theory. When you are on to them next time ask to speak to a manager or supervisor as they are often better informed. The loss of speed is down to BT in this country as they can reroute your broadband where ever they want in order to avoid upsetting commercial customers that pay a lot and demand more. The re routing effectively makes you farther away from the exchange and therefore you get a loss in speed. I suggest you ditch BT at the first opportunity and go to Talk Talk, don't believe all that you hear, as I get a consistent 4.2 Mb and have had no problems in the 15 months I have been with them. You also get a free phone number for problems.

Answer 3

Have you ran a spyware or virus check on your machine? Those can decrease your bandwidth very quickly if you have to much. Also, if you have a router, you might check its log, see if you are getting flooded by pings of death. Those will also cause loss of band. The way to stop that is by going to your firewall and stopping ping (ICMP)

If I am having trouble, and I think its the line, I will call the support line, and ask to be transfered to a higher tier of support. The people that answer the phone usually just have a book they read from to start the troubleshooting. The upper tier folk have the ablity to run more extensive tests on your line, and can usually help you out more.

Answer 4

Mine has decreased as well, pain in the butt, I'm paying broadband fees for slow-band, slower than dial up, and when you ring up for clear assistance you get some fella from India who doesn't speak clearly, ring them up directly and ask to speak to a technician from the UK, your within your rights, my sisters boyfriend did with AOL and they soon referred him to someone from the UK, if you're not contracted with them just threaten to go to another service, then maybe they will get their priorities in order, good luck!