Hi, I have recently joined an ISP for ADSL in my new house. For the first week and a half of having ADSL my connection was fine apart from dropping out all the time - I will deal with this separately. However, starting yesterday afternoon my speed tests that I have been regularly doing have shown a D/L of as low as 0.3Megabit up to 0.5Megabit. Having called my ISP, they claimed I am far away from the exchange and that my line cannot support 8MB. I accept this, but since earlier in the week I have been averaging between 1.4 and 1.8MB, I was somewhat disappointed to see that my speed has dropped so drastically. The guy on the phone also claimed that a 10 day setting in period always ensues after connection. I am happy for this to be the case - but find it somewhat unlikely that my connection would slow down this much all of a sudden?? My ADSL router (D-link 524t) mentions a data rate of 2720kbps and 448kbps for downstream and upstream respectively. This suggests to me that I am connected at this speed, but my speeds are being throttled? To add insult to injury, when I use bit torrent, it seems that the ADSL router becomes overloaded with connections and then completely locks up even preventing access to its interface, thus requiring a hard reset. Any ideas??? I'm going spare! Andrew
The 10-day period is true for DSL modems. You should always leave them connected and powered up for the first 10 days to ensure the best connection. I cant explain the dropped connection speed though. What were you using to test your speed? Did you try different test sites? Torrents do open a lot of connections to your network and can cause a lock up of the router and or modem due to the fact that the routing tables get so huge (due to all teh connections) that you run out of RAM in the router. Set your torrent client to limit the # of connections and see if you can find a sweet spot.
Hi, Thankyou for your input. I have been caining my connection ever since it has been connected in the hope that I can 'stretch' it if you will. As for BitTorrent, I did read elsewhere that the number of connections used is very high and can cause problems. The router unit gets very hot indeed and made me worry somewhat. I have tried reducing the number of connections in my Torrent application and this worked well for about 3 hours - before it became pushed over the edge. My connection speed problem is what bothers me most though, since I can buy another router, I just wonder whether my ISP is punishing me? I have tried a number of sites to test my speed, so presumably can vouch for its accuracy.
