anyone got any good tips on sorting knackered broadband out?

Without obvious explanation it suddenly dropped speed massively about 4 weeks ago. Ethernet and wireless both affected.

have called BT three times now, all they do is ' run a few tests' then tell me the line is fine and suggest I monitor the connection for a few days! they sent a new router ( home hub) but it made no difference.

bt engineer is due to come out Monday with the booking made with a threatening ' it'll cost you 100 quid if he doesn't find any problems he can sort' from BT!

Switch everything off and unplug everything. Leave for at least fifteen minutes. Plug it all back in and switch on.

I don't know what can happen in the fifteen minutes, but thats what i was told to do with my old talk talk broadband.

Try disconnecting the ring wire (wire no 3) at the incoming master socket. That can often improve line speed. The phones will still ring BTW.

Russ

how many machines share the broadband? turn them all off then try them one at a time with all the others off, it could be you have an infected machine being used as a bot that is eating your bandwidth or it could also be a faulty nic in a pc causing a packet storm.
HTH

I have had this problem twice in both cases it turned out to be problem with the card at the exchange, in both timesas it got worse eventually affected the voice line.

Good luck.

Good advise above

Download speed test and check that at 6pm 9am n 2pm n see what speeds your getting.

The BT engineers are normally quite sound chaps. To cover your back, take the front cover off the main BT socket in the house, then plug into the one behind it. Everything backwards of this point is BT's responsibility. If its still poor, then it's nothing you've done. We've had BT out 6 times in the last 6 years for poor broadband. Speed isn't too bad, but a drops a lot. The problem is there is no pattern to it. Each time they replace something either just outside the house, or at the exchange. It gets better for 6 months, then starts to drop again. Hopefully yours will be a 10 minute job caused by a little corrosion on the wires as they come into the house. The call centres are utterly useless. I switched to Sky for this reason as they have a better reputation (UK call centres help)

Cheers

Lee

Have you had anything else plugged into the phone line recently? Like a new dect phone or sky installation? Do the have filters?

Have you tried replacing the filter the router plugs into?

Jon

I got so fed up with all the Sh1t you get from BT, i switched to Sky which starts tomorrow. Hopefully, that will have solved our problem. As a minimum though, we will have better support and not have to speak to people called 'Steve' or 'Jeff' in India.

BT are absolutely useless. I just hope Sky are better.

Cheers for the tips guys.

I've already plugged direct into my 'test socket' and tried going through devices one by one - no joy. It's been reset a LOT of times over the last few weeks - due to having to shift to test socket /

I haven't replaced the ASDL filter - but I did run it straight into the test socket with the phone disconnected and no filter - with no change.

The thing I don't get is that my router ASDL stats show that it's connected at nearly 7mbps:

ADSL line status


Connection information

Line state Connected
Connection time 1 day, 10:04:05
Downstream 6,784 Kbps
Upstream 448 Kbps


But try and run any video or anything and it just grinds to a halt - even connected via Ethernet cable...

Any if I try and access anything with my wireless devices it is worse than useless...

There is a possibility of a dodgy PSU plugged in the house somewhere.

At my last job, our ISDN went down, BT couldn't figure it out, turned out to be a power supply from one of the CCTV cameras, causing interference over the mains ring.

it could be that in fact there is nothing wrong with your line but the exchange is becoming overloaded. remember that the advertised speed is a maximum and doesn't factor in contention ratios, ie you may have 20 meg but you may also be sharing it with 10 other people in your street. the engineer should be able to look at the logs at the exchange and see if its just a capacity issue.

Ah yes - I failed to mention...
Broadband ASDL stats are telling me my connection is about 6.7mbps. No problem with that.

Thing is, the BT speed test is telling me I am getting about 0.3mbps... Which seems realistic considered the speed at which things are working...!

Given I changed NOTHING in my home at the time the whole thing ground to a halt - I really can't understand the fact that BT are telling me they can't find any problems...

i have occasionally had slow speeds even though router stats have been fine and its ended up being a stuck ip profile. frequent disconnections can cause it to drop and it should go back up when the line becomes more stable again but sometimes it doesn't and its needed a call to my isp to sort it. mind you as you've spoken to them they should know if that was the problem.

have you done further diagnostics on the bt speedtest to see what your profile is?