Painfully Slow Eircom Broadband

Sean-Tom

I live out in the country south of Galway and am using eircom's business lite 1Mb broadband. However according to broadband.gov.ie I cannot receive broadband???. When downloading the average speed is 16Kbps and i recently did a test (speedtest.net) which gave it at 0.14 Mb. Once about a year ago it was at 100Kbps for about a week. Is there anything that could be causing this lack of speed or are eircom just mean?

Ass

id take it to joe duffy tbh

Sean-Tom

Anyone with a more serious answer

dub45

Well the best way to try and diagnose your problem is to check your line stats - post them here.

However if you are far from the exchange then you are subject to the inbuilt deficiencies of dsl. Speed deteriorates the further away that you are.

On the other hand if Eircom gave you bb that suggests that your line qualified at some stage in the past so a problem may have developed since.


If you just ran a line check on that site that's pretty irrelevant. BB enabled lines always fail that test.

So line stats please.

Sean-Tom

I am a bit of a noob here so what exactly do you mean by line stats and where can i get them?

dub45

Line stats essentially define the 'health' of your line and the speeds that it is capable of. It is important to remember that each line is unique. If you imagine the tortuous path from the exchange to the house and then the various combinations of internal wiring that a signal may face it is easy to understand why this is.

Have a read of this:

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/linestats.htm


If you are using the Eircom netopia I think the stats are under the advanced heading on your left hand side.

crawler

As Dub45 says - if you can post up your line stats here, we can help you out or at least tell you what the issue is likely to be...

If you are in rural Galway you also may be on a subtended exchange and suffering from heavy contention.

Anyway post the stats here (or let someone you know remotely access the router for you to get same - the Netopia router allows this) and we will be able to let you know.

If you are using wireless to connect as a first step you might try physically connecting to the router to see if it makes a difference.

Official Netopia support here http://www.netopia.com/support/hardware/2247w.html

Sean-Tom

i think these are them
Line state: up, Modulation: DMT, Data path: interleave


Max allowed speed(kbps) 160down 128up
SN margin (db) 3.00down 12.00up
Line attenutation 63.50down 31.50up
CRC errors 7down 1up

dub45

Yes sadly your line stats are disastrous!:eek:

The snr is bad - it really needs to be up around 10 and your attenuation is very high too.

Could you remover everything that might be attached anywhere in your house to your phone circuit and try the modem plugged in directly without the filter and see what the stats are.

To be honest I am surprised that you actually got bb with stats like that.

Sean-Tom

Plugged out the phone and
speed is the same
SN margin: 14.50down 12up
Line attenuation same
CRC errors 0down 1up

dub45

Your snr margin has improved dramatically though which would suggest that maybe your dsl filter is worth replacing.

The higher snr should give you a more stable connection. Have you any idea at all how far you might be from the exchange?

Sean-Tom

I don't have a filter i have 2 connections in my house one in the kitchen for the phone and one in the sitting room for the broadband. Also I think I am around 10miles from the exchange

jor el

If an engineer did the install, then the filter may be built into that socket. If there isn't, then it will still work, but you'll drop the connection each time you use the phone.

If you are 10 miles from the exchange, you shouldn't have DSL at all. The practical limit is 5km (3 miles) though some have reported it to work (poorly) at up to 5 miles.

crawler

Sadly, those stats are woeful - I am amazed it qualified at all.

Replace the filter and ensure there is a filter on EACH phone point and hope for the best I think is all you can do....also you could ring eircom and ask them to put you on the highest interleaving setting possible (though suspect you already are) to maintain some form of stability on the line. Provided you are not a gamer, this should not matter too much in latency terms.

lucernarian

IMO, the best thing to do here is to call eircom and tell them that your modem is only working at 160 kbps. Go through the usual troubleshooting steps.

The problem is probably a mix of a long line and some dodgy connections in your house (filters etc). If eircom replaced your main socket with a special one which you plug the modem into, then you would get higher speeds. This special socket has a good filter built into it. But you need to call eircom in the first place to increase the speed from its current level. And eircom will go through with you exactly what you need to have your modem installed properly too, and will send you out filters if needed.

If that route doesn't work out, let us know! There are more things that can help with this.

Points of Information: If the line were 10 miles long, eircom wouldn't have passed it full stop. Barring very non-standard lines, the absolute limit is around 5 miles. Doubling that length is simply impossible.

The SNR measurements are instantaneous and should be done a few times over a minute to give an actual value.

A line with such a high attenuation would automatically be on the reach extended profile, with full interleaving (about 50 ms ping times).

Also, the netopia modems are rather dodgy at measuring an accurate attenuation. My attenuation measurement is possibly out by 25 db, and they definitely can't measure beyond 0-63.5 dB.