Internet is at crawl.

[adamr8965]

Just put the ps3 back on and everything has slowed down again.

[Rik]

It's using your bandwidth for some purpose, Adam. Was the film being played locally, or streamed?

[adamr8965]

was a blu-ray disc. and the internet to the ps3 is ethernet which is unplugged

[pctech]

Do you make use of Wi-FI at all?

[Rik]

So it's not connected to the net, but when you turn it on it slows your connection? In that case, I can only think that either the PS3 or its power supply is generating a lot of noise. If you have a battery powered AM radio, de-tune it so that you only have white noise, then run it over the PSU, the cable to the PS3 and the PS3 itself. If the noise increased on the radio, that's the source of your interference. (Though normally I'd expect that to cause re-syncs rather than slow throughput.)

Is there anything else connected to the network, does your router show any other active connections?

[zappaDPJ]

I've been out all day so I've just read the replies. As those trace routes appear to be showing an issue my side of the faceplate I'm try to fathom what I can do to isolate where the problems lies.

The set up I have is two PCs hard wired into the router and wireless access which my daughter uses. I currently have access to 3 Netgear routers, one of which was set up by IDNet to resolve an issue with simultaneous uploading and downloading. I know the problem occurs regardless of which router gets used so that would appear to eliminate that. I also know that the symptoms are apparent on more than one device because when it happens to me, it also happens to my daughter if she's on her laptop. In addition it will happen if I'm the only one on the network. I can't really say if it happens when my daughter is alone on the network. The second PC is rarely used.

I have 3 separate networks on my PC (all have been tried), 2 on the motherboard and an additional card which I put in to try and eliminate a problem when my switch to WBC failed. 99.9% of the time I use my Max connection. There are no devices plugged into the Max connection other than the filter. I've changed the filter a couple of times and swapped over the LAN leads between the two PCs (not replaced).

I'd say this problem first occurred a couple of months ago and it's very intermittent, at worst once every hour. Sometimes I'll not notice it all day. When it happens voice comms to a dedicated Ventrilo server stops for around a minute, sometimes a little longer. When the lag finishes I can hear what I said around a minute ago coming back at me through another person's open headset. During this period some websites become unreachable while others are fine. If I'm watching something like iPlayer it tells me I have insufficient bandwidth and will quite often restart the content I'm watching from the start. The speed tests I've conducted from websites that are reachable during the lag period give results that are in line with my best results. They also show low latency.

Any ideas because I'm stumped  

[pctech]

Not using a hub anywhere are you Zap?

[zappaDPJ]

No, just the Netgear.

[adamr8965]

No rik wifi is secure noone but me knows the code, router sits below the ps3, and the plugs for it are right next to phone socket.

Noise margin stays the same around 8.9 to 10.5

[pctech]

No, just the Netgear.

Not sure myself to be honest.

I'm tempted to advise you to reset one of your routers to factory condition and put it in to see if it has any effect on the problem as it sounds like either a bottleneck is occurring somewhere or something odd is happening with the router firmware.

[pctech]

Just tried to reproduce the problem by running a tracert to idnetters.co.uk while streaming a channel on TV Catchup but couldn't

See the tracert below

Tracing route to www.idnetters.co.uk [212.69.36.28]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2   143 ms   135 ms   159 ms  loop-l2tp.fb1.newnet.co.uk [212.87.69.130]
  3   132 ms   253 ms   327 ms  lns0.th.newnet.co.uk [212.87.69.193]
  4   162 ms    37 ms   123 ms  7609-1.lan2.newnet.co.uk [212.87.79.65]
  5    96 ms   110 ms   131 ms  telehouse-gw.idnet.net [195.66.224.181]
  6   103 ms    29 ms    26 ms  redbus-gw2-g0-1-331.idnet.net [212.69.63.5]
  7    97 ms   154 ms   113 ms  redbus-gw1-fa2-0-300.idnet.net [212.69.63.225]
  8    94 ms   115 ms   110 ms  hosting2.idnet.net [212.69.36.28]

Trace complete.

I am using a Netgear DG834G v4 with the latest firmware v5.01.16

[Technical Ben]

Just been to the parents. Their internet slows down too sporadically, but I know what Whom the problem is.
Glad to see you are narrowing down the trouble, and it's rather easy to sort out. Well, compared to digging up the road that is.

Oh. Big idea here (well, googled a result). I just read that the PS3/Xbox360 Wireless controller can interfere with the router. It constantly "pings" to check if the controller is available, or a button is being pressed. This can interfere with a wifi signal and the router. [edit] Netgear DG834PN (your exact model! ) seems to be effected. However the controllers are bluetooth, so it's strange that it is interfering. The router is spending all it's time being distracted by interference, and putting your website requests on hold. [/edit]
Try totally disabling the Wifi on the router via it's options, and see if the PS3 still interferes. If the PS3 still interferes it might be the electrics and plug sockets, if it's fixed, you at least know it's the PS3 controllers causing the problem.

[double edit]
Ok, I've replied to like 3 of you there, and not realised how many different problems people are having. So I do not know if it applies to everyone sorry. 

[Gary]

I have a PS3 running on its 2.4ghz and its not affecting the laptop, my Mac is running on 5Ghz and thats fine as well, no slowdowns at all at the moment. Using a DGND3300.

[zappaDPJ]

I have a significant update. I phoned a friend who is a qualified network engineer and we've spent most of the evening testing my connection... well to be honest he's spent most of the evening testing my connection while I struggle to keep up. He's identified the problem but is completely mystified as to the cause. The problem is my network is being intermittently throttled or degraded by as much as 90% but only when I connect to the Internet with a browser or application. He's going to ask around at work to see if anyone has any ideas and bring a different make of modem/router to try.

[Technical Ben]

I have a spare! (although redundant in this thread as you seem to have a supply already)
Will test it this week, and if it works, could see if I can lend it out. 

[zappaDPJ]

That's a very kind offer, thanks Let me see what happens on Wednesday evening when he's due to come back with a couple of different routers.

[zappaDPJ]

[double edit]
Ok, I've replied to like 3 of you there, and not realised how many different problems people are having. So I do not know if it applies to everyone sorry. 

Yeah, I thought we were having the same issue as the symptoms were identical but I'm now pretty sure that is not the case.

[Niall]

I've just tested my setup again, and it seems everything is perfect again. What ever the problem was seems to have been totally corrected. As I mentioned, I was only downloading on (legal!) torrent sites at a crawl, even when the torrent had over 6000 seeds I was only getting just over 200Kb/S. I've just tried again and it's back to the maximum my line supports, and I can browse the net just fine, where before some pages would take a while to completely load (4-5 seconds instead of instantly).

Long may it continue. I just wish we were allowed to know what BT were doing that caused this in the first place! {edit} Just to be clear, I'm blaming BT not IDnet

[Rik]

I have a significant update. I phoned a friend who is a qualified network engineer and we've spent most of the evening testing my connection... well to be honest he's spent most of the evening testing my connection while I struggle to keep up. He's identified the problem but is completely mystified as to the cause. The problem is my network is being intermittently throttled or degraded by as much as 90% but only when I connect to the Internet with a browser or application. He's going to ask around at work to see if anyone has any ideas and bring a different make of modem/router to try.

Have you tried booting into safe mode with networking support, Zap?

[Gary]

What encryption do you use Zap? is it WEP or WPA2. and how strong is it? I use WPA2 with 63 random printable ASCII characters. for full encryption, changing your code may be a good idea, shieldsup generates good random passwords. https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

[zappaDPJ]

Have you tried booting into safe mode with networking support, Zap?

My friend did several times yesterday when he ran a battery of tests.

What encryption do you use Zap? is it WEP or WPA2. and how strong is it? I use WPA2 with 63 random printable ASCII characters. for full encryption, changing your code may be a good idea, shieldsup generates good random passwords. https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

I'm using WPA-PSK with a 63 character randomly generated key Gary.

I'm pretty sure my friend thinks I have 3 faulty Netgear routers, he's asked me to carry out some further tests today. Although the problem isn't intermittent in that it can be replicated on demand, there are some inconsistencies that are really confusing things.

Actually before I forget I must give Steve a Karma for noticing the problem with the first hop. I missed that completely and it was that which pointed the way to identify the issue. Now we just need to identify the cause 

[Steve]

Thanks, Hope you get it sorted.

[Rik]

This is one of those annoying issues which is going to prove to be something very simple, Zap. 

[zappaDPJ]

I think I'm half way to identifying the cause but I'm even more baffled now. All the PCs here run Vista with the exception of my main PC which runs both Vista and Windows 7. Any PC running a combination of Vista and most multimedia based applications will cause my network to throttle. It seems that if there's nothing on my network but Windows 7 I can run anything on that system without any network degradation. I'm going to put an old hard drive containing a Windows XP PRO installation into one of the PCs and see what that does.

[Steve]

Any use ? May not be relevant and its 3 years old

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx

and this

http://www.vistarevisited.com/2008/05/24/how-to-improve-network-performance-in-windows-vista/