Eircom - Paying for 8mb Next Gen Broadband... getting 2 mb at best

ILikeTurtles

I live in the Navan region and the internet is shocking... Anyone else anywhere experiencing this?! :mad:

lucernarian

There are quite a lot of threads dealing with this, and some of the possible causes. If you live on the outskirts of Navan towards e.g Trim, Kells or Slane then the likely problem is the line is too long. There are many others in the same boat, eircom sell the package as "up to 8 mbps" but BT have a similar system (slightly more conservative, particularly with shorter lines) and the average connection from that is around 4.5 mb/s, not near the up to 8 mb/s limit.

You need to provide some sort of speed tests and also the numbers from the DSL line statistics or DSL line details page of the router's webpage (accessible by typing in 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.1.254 in your web browser)

ILikeTurtles

Okay, here is my speedtest results



I live about 5 minutes outside Navan so it can't change drastically

Heres the DSL stats :

SL standard: ADSL_G.dmt
near-end interleaved channel bit rate: 2048 kbps
near-end fast channel bit rate: 0 kbps
far-end interleaved channel bit rate: 256 kbps
far-end fast channel bit rate: 0 kbps

near-end FEC error fast: 0
near-end FEC error interleaved: 0
near-end CRC error fast: 0
near-end CRC error interleaved: 1694
near-end HEC error fast: 0
near-end HEC error interleaved: 3447
far-end FEC error fast: 0
far-end FEC error interleaved: 6
far-end CRC error fast: 0
far-end CRC error interleaved: 11
far-end HEC error fast: 0
far-end HEC error interleaved: 12
ADSL uptime 216:34:29

noise margin downstream: 215 0.1db
output power upstream: 120 0.1db
attenuation downstream: 500 0.1db
tone 0- 31: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 32- 63: 00 00 00 00 00 00 22 22 22 22 22 20 00 00 02 45
tone 64- 95: 06 77 77 88 87 88 98 88 88 88 98 88 78 87 78 88
tone 96-127: 88 67 87 27 77 77 77 66 65 54 30 34 55 54 64 64
tone 128-159: 65 56 55 43 26 56 26 45 06 45 04 45 03 44 00 20
tone 160-191: 00 02 20 20 20 20 00 00 02 20 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 192-223: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 224-255: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 256-287: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 288-319: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 320-351: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 352-383: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 384-415: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 416-447: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 448-479: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 480-511: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

noise margin upstream: 310 0.1db
output power downstream: 165 0.1db
attenuation upstream: 260 0.1db
tone 0- 31: 00 00 00 02 34 44 55 55 55 55 44 44 43 32 20 00
tone 32- 63: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 64- 95: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 96-127: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 128-159: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 160-191: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 192-223: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 224-255: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 256-287: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 288-319: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 320-351: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 352-383: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 384-415: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 416-447: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 448-479: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
tone 480-511: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Sponge Bob

eircom have wrecked the service for a lot of long line customers on upgraded exchanges with all the extra crosstalk.

lucernarian

Sponge Bob, the noise margin values are 21.5dB/31dB. Hardly a line that's suffering from too much crosstalk??

ILikeTurtles, I suggest you call your ISP and ask them to increase the maximum sync speed of your line. It's currently set to 2 mbps but the line can handle 3 or 4 mbps.

Apart from that, you seem to be getting a solid 2 mbps and that's fast enough for speedy web browsing if your computer's working fine.

ILikeTurtles

Okay will do thanks...

I play xbox and there is 4 laptops in the house so, there is alot of people on at once So at peak times its slow enough.

Sponge Bob

He sure is getting a lot of downstream ( downstream = "Far End") errors. His upstream of 256k or 378k is perfect.

Mind you a HEC error as distinct from a FEC error indicates that the PPPoE stream is corrupt, the 'H' refers to the header in the encapulated IP feed inside the stream not the stream itself.

Maybe fannying about with the MTU value would help but I cannot recall the various MTU settings to try. Possibly the Xbox is sending the wrong MTU which causes packet breakups.

See this link, is the MTU set to 1440, which would seem too low to me. IIRC eircom runs at 1492 MTU or 1464 MSS, if you ask for the wrong size packets it will cause fragmentation and slowness.

http://www.speedguide.net/faq_in_q.php?qid=204

First try running some frag test pings off the PC Command line. eg

ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1492 ( it will complain about fragmentation for sure, this is too high)
ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1465
ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1464
ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1413
ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1412
ping www.boards.ie -f -l 1400

and paste all the results in here.

lucernarian

No need for all that testing, the ideal MTU size for PPPoE is 1454 bytes. I had to use Telnet to set it on the family's Netopia. The max MTU allowed for PPPoE is 1492 but that is slightly less efficient, maybe by 1%.

And every DSL connection will suffer HEC and FEC errors. The amount doesn't matter, what matters is the rate of errors per unit time. The experience from back when Irish Broadband had massive problems with congestion and speed and packet loss was that when packet loss started to exceed 2%, HTTP throughput started to significantly deteriorate.

Now in those comprehensive DSL line stats, we can see that the line had been running for 9 days which is quite a long time. In the number of ATM or ethernet frames sent on a 2 mbps connection over 216 hours, a couple of thousand HEC errors is a drop in the ocean. And this bit is my own speculation but I think those header/frame errors come about from the likes of switching on or off a light switch, a thunderstorm in the area, a fridge/freezer thermostat kicking in or something which adds noise for say 5 milliseconds, enough to overcome the forward error correction and a moderate interleaving depth used on the DSL line. The signal margin then recovers.

In other words, you'd have to have a line that's less than 200 metres long and is contained in a cave to avoid some CRC or frame errors! The usual signal margin is what matters here, and I assume there's been no full losses of DSL connectivity on the line.

The Xbox MTU *might* need adjusting but I've never seen a problem with MTU size and speed in the standard home setup. There's no harm in setting it to 1492 or 1454 I suppose.

I'm convinced here that the problem is with eircom setting the speed too low. It should be raised to 3 mbps and that will certainly help matters!

Sponge Bob

I recommend he runs the pings first and then we will see. I have no probs at a 1464 MSS He has no FEC errors really ...only HEC errors.

dub45

ILikeTurtles wrote: »

Okay will do thanks...

I play xbox and there is 4 laptops in the house so, there is alot of people on at once So at peak times its slow enough.

Are any of them "downloading" while others are doing ordinary stuff like xbox?

lucernarian

Sponge Bob wrote: »

I recommend he runs the pings first and then we will see. I have no probs at a 1464 MSS He has no FEC errors really ...only HEC errors.

That point about using 1454 may not apply to DSL/PPPoE as used in Ireland actually, but I've never seen any instabilities from using 1492 or anything lower than this on any residential internet connection in this country. If the MTU size was too high then the poor customer wouldn't even be able to get on to the internet never mind have slow internet usage! Every eircom modem out there by default uses 1492 bytes as the MTU size and it works fine, I can't see why that would be any different here.

I've had a modem which reported detailed statistics on different error counts, like what's in the post above. This was an ADSL2+ connection getting 18 mbps but with a low signal margin of 6dB. It had a large (>5,000) HEC level and a lower number for FEC over a week, but millions of ATM frames had been sent over the same time. There could be over 10000 errors to headers or even the complete frame (the FEC count will naturally be lower, compared to a simple CRC that's used in every single ATM cell sent) but when you've sent 6 million ATM frames in the last 9 days, as this 1 mbit connection has, it's a drop in the ocean. By my earlier reckoning, I'd have to suffer 120,000 downstream Header Errors in those 9 days to start noticing its effects. It's a simplistic calculation but I'm trying to show that the line is absolutely healthy and no changes or fiddling is needed with the router!