NTL broadband update [July 2006]

fatherdougalmag

Duplicate post removed

fatherdougalmag

I've taken the liberty of dialling into esat's 1890 number and VisualRoute'ing to sip.blueface.ie and upload.ntlworld.ie. Here are the results:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Hop | %Loss | IP Address      | Node Name                   | Location   |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0   |       | xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx | xxxxxxx                     | *          |
| 1   |       | 193.95.136.206  | ts527.cwt.esat.net          | ?(Ireland) |
| 2   |       | 193.95.137.125  | vlan501.rt502.cwt.esat.net  | ?(Ireland) |
| 3   |       | 193.95.130.161  | vlan54.rt002.cwt.esat-x.com | ?(Ireland) |
| 4   |       | 193.95.129.23   | ge2-0.br003.cwt.esat.net    | ?(Ireland) |
| 5   |       | 213.242.106.133 | -                           | ?(Ireland) |
| 6   |       | 213.242.106.14  | -                           | ?(Ireland) |
| 7   |       | 213.168.225.133 | sip.blueface.ie             | ?(Ireland) |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roundtrip time to sip.blueface.ie, average = 40ms, min = 40ms, max = 40ms -- 17-Aug-2006 17:03:35

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Hop | %Loss | IP Address      | Node Name                          | Location               |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0   |       | xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx | xxxxxxx                            | *                      |
| 1   |       | 193.95.136.206  | ts527.cwt.esat.net                 | ?(Ireland)             |
| 2   |       | 193.95.136.125  | vlan500.rt502.cwt.esat.net         | ?(Ireland)             |
| 3   |       | 193.95.130.145  | vlan52.rt001.cwt.esat.net          | ?(Ireland)             |
| 4   |       | 193.95.129.7    | ge3-0.br002.cwt.esat.net           | ?(Ireland)             |
| 5   |       | 166.49.153.129  | t2a4-p9-1.nl-ams2.eu.bt.net        | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| 6   |       | 195.69.144.106  | nl-ams04a-ri1-gige-5-1.aorta.net   | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| 7   |       | 213.46.183.77   | -                                  | ?(Netherlands)         |
| 8   |       | 213.46.161.154  | nl-ams02a-ra1-10ge-0-1-0.aorta.net | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| 9   |       | 213.46.183.26   | -                                  | ?(Netherlands)         |
| 10  |       | 62.179.105.4    | -                                  | ?(Austria)             |
| 11  |       | 62.179.105.12   | upload.ntlworld.ie                 | ?(Austria)             |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

christophicus

My connection down here in waterford(6 meg line) is stable ,it hasnt been dropping recently as opposed to the first 3 month i had it. But the speed is increadibly slow and has been for 2-3 weeks. Im getting in or around 1.5 Mb/s at the moment and the upload speed test never finish's i asume it crashes or somthing.

dr.bollocko

It would make a lot more sense to actually do a speed test in the terminating country for your broadband connection. Because if you go to www.speedtest.ie your request leaves the country through upc fibre, then terminates at, is it Austria? Someone mentioned in an earlier post, then the IP address is resolved and it returns to Ireland again. This would not give you an accurate representation of a true speed test, as a broadband company would do it. Still though, at a busy time, a 3.5mb speed on a 6mb line is more fictional than fantastic, given the horror that is irish broadband. If it in fact does terminate in Holland as mentioned above, www.speedtest.nl

dr.bollocko

about the 10mb moving to a 6mb line, what someone said avove is probably correct. NTL moved from the standard uk connection of 10mb to the UPC line. This resulted in rolling off the 6mb line. From what u are posting, it appears a very strange issue, these problems with www.buy4now.ie etc. It seems that the server is finding the hop for the IP address of the site. In other words, not a routing issue. So It is resolving the IP address, polling the site, but not finding and delivering the site?
I mean how would u even begin to figure that one out????

Aquos76

christophicus wrote:

My connection down here in waterford(6 meg line) is stable ,it hasnt been dropping recently as opposed to the first 3 month i had it. But the speed is increadibly slow and has been for 2-3 weeks. Im getting in or around 1.5 Mb/s at the moment and the upload speed test never finish's i asume it crashes or somthing.

What are your download speeds if you are d/l a file from here?

You should be getting between 650 and 700 KBps

Trotter

Is anyone else finding it still impossible to get into their NTL webspace?

GrahamG

Signed up to 2mbps line just last Saturday (Aug 12th) and since then have had terrible service with connection dropping off every few minutes any time of the day.
In response to the hope that people will change their 120 modems to the 250 model and rid the problems - surely they installed a 250 for me since it was just last week? And i'm still struggling to get a connection. I'll check the modem when I get home, maybe i'm giving NTL too much credit to give me the up to date technology?!

Based in Dublin 14. I'm going to keep ringing support until someone eventually answers...

fatherdougalmag

I got a 250 swapped in yesterday (look underneath) and, although things are better, the underlying problem is still there. I can upload and download simultaneously but it eventually stops. The modem doesn't look like it's reset (the usual start up stuff isn't in the modem's event log). All I know is that it stops working although the status suggests that everything is still connected. It might be that the 120 was picking up on this condition and auto-rebooting to try and recover. The 250 just seems to sit there. I might spend some time with docsdiag to try and capture the signal levels when the connection drops. It might be something on the line that's causing the modem to drop off.

When I do stay connected, there aren't any apparent problems with transfer speeds. In fact, Robin Walker's NTL speed test seems to be quite good. It's reporting my 3Mbps to a near enough degree.

Infini

Id have to concur with fatherdougalmag he seems to be having the same issues as i am. Id assumed it was the modem that was actin up but i still cant access places like buy4now.

edit: looks like i sopke too early Doin a bittorrent test Torrents ARE workin for me again Ive even pushed the upload up to 18kb and have yet to lose the connection ists been goin steady for the last 45min! I can even run FFXI at the same time as it again WOHOOO!!

Dopey

fatherdougalmag, how do you view the modem\s event log?

Cheers

fatherdougalmag

It's a feature on the 250 modem. It wasn't available on the 120. Just go to http://192.168.100.1 and log in (root/root). You'll see 'Event Log' on the left hand side.

_CyRuSS_

Infini wrote:

Id have to concur with fatherdougalmag he seems to be having the same issues as i am. Id assumed it was the modem that was actin up but i still cant access places like buy4now.ie and my bittorrents arent workin either If they dont solve this issues soon imma gonna have to consider gettin another ISP (even tho the service up to upgrade has been pretty excellent.....

nobody on ntl can

MrPunch

Aquos76 wrote:

What are your download speeds if you are d/l a file from here?

You should be getting between 650 and 700 KBps

6Meg line, 250 Modem since the start.
Speed for that ISO from heanet is 190Kbps sustained over 15 minutes. :mad:

john

christophicus

Aquos76 wrote:

What are your download speeds if you are d/l a file from here?

You should be getting between 650 and 700 KBps

yeah im doing that now and am getting approx 200 KBps, well below par,and i have been for a few months its quite sad really. Anyone have anything that i might be able to do to speed the connection up?

aphex™

christophicus wrote:

yeah im doing that now and am getting approx 200 KBps, well below par,and i have been for a few months its quite sad really. Anyone have anything that i might be able to do to speed the connection up?

Wait for a while till they peer with INEX again??

christophicus

Ahh my speed has always been very bad. Even when people were getting 10Mb/s the fastest i would get was 4Mb/s!!!!!

fatherdougalmag

How do people fare with the Robin Walker speed test?

I'm on (paying for) a 3Mbps service and I get

1st 128K took 406 ms = 322837 Bytes/sec = approx 2686 kbits/sec
2nd 128K took 516 ms = 254016 Bytes/sec = approx 2113 kbits/sec
3rd 128K took 485 ms = 270252 Bytes/sec = approx 2248 kbits/sec
4th 128K took 594 ms = 220660 Bytes/sec = approx 1836 kbits/sec

Pre-(cock)upgrade this was consistently reporting 3Mbps-ish. When I say pre-upgrade I mean the time between when they moved to the UPC/Chello network and before they blasted my 120 modem with whatever config/firmware that made it reboot as soon as it saw that it had to transmit data and receive data at the same time.

Mordax also reports in or around the 2Mbps performance mark (200kBps) but the upload is fairly consistent with 300kb/s. No point me paying for a 3Mbps download service when I'm actually maxing out at 2.

Mark1

Just tried the Robin Walker speed test on my clearwire the programme said the results to fast over 2.5Mbps. http://www.abeltronica.com/velocimetro/pt/?idioma=uk&newlang=uk seems to give fairly accurate results any comments

seamus

Just got my modem replaced with a 250. Speed is better than ever, and stable. Still can't get the same sites as everyone else, and DNS lookups are a little slow.

MartMax

Hi

Just got an engineer (yes an engineer) in after 3 weeks waiting for constant drop connections problem to be fixed. He checked all the signals and all. He replaced the splitter for the cable tv and modem. He concluded that everything is working fine, no signal issues but he will request the network engineer to check the underground cables on Monday. Surprisingly, the connection has been working fine since this morning before he came in. I hope it lasts! Oh yes, I am still on the old modem 120. I don't mind as long as broadband stays on for 24 hours, not for 2 mins. Afaik, the other few websites are still inaccessible. That's different story perhaps, DNS.

The ping results :

Pinging www.boards.ie [82.195.136.250] with 32 bytes of data

Reply from 82.195.136.250: bytes=32 time=61ms TTL=53
Reply from 82.195.136.250: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=53
Reply from 82.195.136.250: bytes=32 time=60ms TTL=53
Reply from 82.195.136.250: bytes=32 time=59ms TTL=53

Ping statistics for 82.195.136.250:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 59ms, Maximum = 61ms, Average = 60ms

Mart

GetOffMyPatch

I pay 20 quid a month for a 1mb connection with NTL.
Running speed tests (over wireless) show me nearly at 2mb

Download Speed Upload Speed Qos RTT Maxpause
1902 kbps (233 KB/s) 195 kbps (24 KB/s) 86 % 53 ms 155 ms

Is anyone showing increased speeds like above??

Aquos76

Well I am on the 3mb pack @29.99 and I am d/l from the link I provided earlier in the thread @ 430KBps, which is slightly higher than what 3mb is. I am on a wireless network here also.

TBH, my speeds have become alot more stable since I downgraded from the 6mb.

MartMax

Argh... not long after the engineer left (in 1-2 hrs), the connection has gone mad again. From 4pm to 11pm, there was no connection as it looked like not getting signal at all! Unbelievable! I guess there will be 4 weeks, 5 weeks... and so on... having no proper broadband!

This is the reading from the cable modem as at this morning.

Downstream Receive Power Level : -0.99 dBmv
Downstream SNR : 33.90 dB
Upstream Transmit Power Level : 61.00 dBmv

TinCool

I'm in Tallaght on NTL on the 6 meg package and am getting 600k/sec download speeds. For the past couple of weeks now. It was a bit flakey for the first few days after the change over but it's grand now.

TC

Stephen P

seamus wrote:

Just got my modem replaced with a 250. Speed is better than ever, and stable. Still can't get the same sites as everyone else, and DNS lookups are a little slow.

How's the connection now seamus? Does it still drop every few minutes? Did the engineer mention anything about the problem in the area?

Trotter

Are NTL aware that some websites arent working.. eg buy4now etc?

GrahamG

Somewhat pleased to report that things were a lot more stable over the weekend in Dublin14 since Friday evening but still not totally stable. I will check speeds later to see if it is anywhere near the 2mb i'm paying for!

christophicus

Im getting just under 280KB/s down here in waterford now, which is better then i ave been getting for a long time, it might just be because of the time of day though as i have never tested at this time before.

Drapper

Very stable in d15 but those dam site still aint working !!! :-(