Extremely slow broadband connection

[T_M_D]

Totally disagree. If you are going to reply to a sensitive thread such as this one then make sure that you have got your facts right. Two of you, including yourself got it wrong, badly! Getting it wrong can make the problem far worse.

Contributors here must not be so, so protective of IDNet in the first instance. Listen to and read what the poster has to say and give a fair and truthful assessment of the situation. This 'protective' stance is not useful and we again should address this position when a cry for help is received as in this particular case.

We can, rightly, praise IDNet for their overall excellent service but when a genuine problem arises we should look at it with a non 'protective' view.

I am aware that this may upset some 'protective' thinking contributors but I feel it has to be said.

Thanks for sticking up for me WDForte 

[T_M_D]

Hopefully IDNet will say the same tomorrow. 

Yeah? I have just done a final speed test for the night and as I suspected would happen, it is pretty well back to normal (for now). BT Speedtest result: 5570kbps. So, I now reckon that there will be 'no fault found' tomorrow leaving me in no man's land for it happening again. My fear is that it will again happen over next week's extended weekend.

I have though got all my BT speed test result screen dumps from today as testimony to this issue.

[zappaDPJ]

Unless things have changed recently, support will have access to all BT Speedtests conducted from their network.

[T_M_D]

Unless things have changed recently, support will have access to all BT Speedtests conducted from their network.

Thanks, that's great - I have screen-dumped them into an email as I was unaware of that.

I have raised many points and asked for my email to be treated as a complaint and for it to be dealt with at the appropriate level within IDNet by someone who is prepared to take the whole thing seriously and who is prepared to investigate it fully and find out what is causing this issue and respond to me accordingly. I have also asked for a measure of assurance that I will not find myself suffering the same fate this up and coming holiday weekend, which is my biggest fear about it at the moment.

Anyway, we shall see, hopefully I will not get a fob off and someone in IDNet will care enough to sort this out. Obviously the way they deal with this, bodes for the way they will potentially treat others who suffer similar loss of service problems OOH.

[Tacitus]

Not my router, not noise, not my cabling......

With respect Tina how do you know for sure that it's not your router unless you've tried another one?  As I suggested it could be heat problems causing an intermittent fault, although I grant from the information provided it does seem unlikely.

It could quite possibly be noise.  Someone switches something on for a while which causes noise via some mechanism we cannot fathom at this stage.  It's later switched off and the problem goes away. 

Whilst I appreciate and share your frustration with support, the only way to isolate broadband problems is usually by the patient application of trial and error, unless of course there's something obvious which iDNet can see from their end. 

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth"  © Sherlock Holmes (or Arthur Conan Doyle if you prefer)   

[T_M_D]

With respect Tina how do you know for sure that it's not your router unless you've tried another one?  As I suggested it could be heat problems causing an intermittent fault, although I grant from the information provided it does seem unlikely.

It could quite possibly be noise.  Someone switches something on for a while which causes noise via some mechanism we cannot fathom at this stage.  It's later switched off and the problem goes away. 

Whilst I appreciate and share your frustration with support, the only way to isolate broadband problems is usually by the patient application of trial and error, unless of course there's something obvious which iDNet can see from their end. 

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth"  © Sherlock Holmes (or Arthur Conan Doyle if you prefer)   

Morning Tacitus. Had IDNet been around to 'check for something obvious' their end I would have been delighted.

I hear what you are saying, but with the best will in the world, I feel that fault finding should be done by the people I am paying money to for my services. I am paying for my broadband and my line rental through IDNet and as such I do not feel the onus should fall on me to fault find other than to do the absolute obvious stuff such as turning the router off from power for a period of time, looking at router stats, connecting via LAN cable, running BT speed tests, etc. Are you saying that broadband providers should not even bother checking anything their end unless a customer has done all these checks AND changed their router? What about people who would not have a clue how to go about doing such things?

I have done everthing I possibly can my end to fault find this issue, bar changing the router, which I do not have and cannot currently afford, however, I will buy another one as soon as I am able as I can see that not having a spare does leave me vulnerable for that time when it will one day be the router and it leaves me vulnerable to anyone having an attitude of reluctance to perform fault finding if a different router has not been tried by the customer.

I am sorry to disagree with you, but I do not feel that it is my router or noise and I do not feel that not having a spare router should mean that no fault finding gets undertaken by the people who take my money. You might not be saying that, but for anyone on the forum thinking this, then that is my view on the subject of spare routers, but after this experience, I will get one so as not to feel so vulnerable.

As I expected, my BT speed test this morning at 7.20am is 5481mbps. This has been the pattern for over 3 days now.

OOH argument aside, what I expect as a customer of ANY broadband/phone service provider is:

They look for the obvious and run basic diagnostics their end and check their network.
They check to see if anyone else is experiencing a similar problem during the period of time the problem occurs/occurred.
They contact BT to find out whether there is anything they might have done to cause the problem.
They get BT to check the exchange.
They get BT to check the line.

If my router was showing obvious signs of being a problem, then I would definitely have expected it to be responsible, but all checks on it indicate it is in good health and the pattern of internet up, internet down over this bank holdiay weekend, is just a bit too neat in my book to be anything other than either bandwidth issues (whatever they might be) or BT messing with equipment or doing maintenance work, or some other issue not thought of.

The biggest fact is the pattern of this - it went down during a busy bank holiday weekend just at peak times for internet usage and it came back up to usability 'incrementally' from what would be the start of internet activity dying down to gaining its full capacity again at a time of night when internet activity is at its lowest.

I just hope this issue can be sorted out and that IDNet will dilligently do the work required to find out what has gone on here and to make sure the problem gets resolved and does not just take the attitude that because there is no currently obvious problem this morning, that they can just ignore it. Where does that leave me if this problem happens again this next extended weekend?

I hope that today, they live up to the reputation that made me join them in the first place and do everything they can to diagnose the problem and to find out what caused it and then to resolve it and get back to me with a full report on the issue. Then, I will feel that they are worth continuing to pay my money to - total lack of OOH support aside!

[pctech]

My intent in contributing to the thread is definitely not to dissuade people from staying with IDNet and my response was to a direct question.

I do think IDNet need to look at their support hours though in light of their competition and maybe use the forum a little more to pick up on issues as it really shouldn't be down to the mods to provide a service that IDNet should be.

I do agree though, the phone service is a much better deal than Zen currently.

[Tacitus]

Are you saying that broadband providers should not even bother checking anything their end unless a customer has done all these checks AND changed their router? What about people who would not have a clue how to go about doing such things?

No I was absolutely not saying that, I was simply pointing out that you cannot know for certain that it is not your router unless you do a swap.  In your case it probably isn't, but you don't know for certain.  However I accept that your first port of call should be iDNet in order to rule out other factors.  I'm not defending them and think they've been remiss in not responding.

I'm sorry you choose to interpret my post in that manner and feel that given the amount of heat that's being generated on this thread, it might be better if we paused until more facts are available.   

Good luck with finding a solution to the problem - I hope support sort it out for you. 

[pctech]

Looking at the problem I'm beginning to wonder if your exchange has been heavily congested Tina

This could either be the spoecific Virtual Path or general backhaul capacity.

Virtual Path capapcity issues can be resolved by support requesting a change in the routing (or at least that used to be the case I believe) but if overall backhaul is congested it is down to BT to upgrade and no BT backhaul based ISP will be able to help sadly.

[Technical Ben]

I think maybe I haven't made my point clearly, Ben. I'm simply saying that broadband has come to be seen in the same light as other utilities and people just expect it to be working 24/7.

Sorry, my mistake. I was agreeing with you. But saying it's kind of unfair for the customer to expect it. Also that the broadband companies do not treat it like electric or gas. It's more like Calour gas bottles, or Oil deliveries. IE, the company pulls all the strings.

Even the TV around here cuts out at times. What do I do? Something else. Why moan when it's certain to get sorted ASAP. 

[Gary]

I must admit with all the sunshine down south I have spent more time out and about than I have for ages, got used to the wheelchair now, still find congestion and slow throughput though, bladdy holiday makers blocking the paths 

[Simon]

Even with my limited knowledge, it does sound more like exchange / VP congestion than anything else.

IDNet will lend out a test router if it comes to it, but let's see what they have to say first. 

[jameshurrell]

Not wanting to wade in (but i'm going to anyway), I had a client who had a very similar problem to TMD's. They weren't with IDNet (it was AOL) and they had a wireless router that their son had bought for them. It had been working fine for months. They called me because they had been experiencing an extremely slow internet connection that was virtually unusable for a period of some weeks.

Sure enough, I get there and check things out on my own laptop (to rule out theirs) and I get the same behaviour. I checked the router stats - they are on a long line, but the stats checked out fine, i.e. sync was 1.8MB and noise and attenuation were what was expected for that line. I then ran some BT speed tests, and they showed that the BRAS profile was in line with what I would have expected for a 1.8MB sync i.e. around 1.5MB, however, throughput was hideous - slower than dialup.

At this point I extracted a Netgear DG384 v4 that I carry in my bag for these sorts of occasions, and connected it up (once I had managed to extract the AOL login and password details from AOL - no mean feat that!!) and well, what do you know, the connection was instantly back to normal. Another BT speed test showed that the throughput was now as would be expected for the BRAS profile that was in place. Webpages loaded fine... I advised the client to throw their router (it was a "Tenda" to name and shame) in the bin (err... recycle it) and ordered them a new Netgear DG834 v5 wireless version. That has been in place for some time now with no issue.

I'm not saying that TMD's router is definitely the issue here, but as has already been stated in this thread, you cannot be certain that it is not at fault... If you are using your own hardware to connect (and not an IDNet supplied router) then I guess it's one more step in the troubleshooting exercise.

Hope the problem is sorted soon.

[Gary]

If you are using your own hardware to connect (and not an IDNet supplied router) then I guess it's one more step in the troubleshooting exercise.

What difference would using a IDNet supplied router make, I see your point, you can never discount your router, even reloading firmware can help, but IDNet supplied routers are nothing extra special from anything else you can buy, they just come with the settings already on board. Its not like Sky where you can only use a Sky router (in theory) as its really hard to extract the user name and password. Last time I looked they provided Netgear DG834G's anyway.

[jameshurrell]

What difference would using a IDNet supplied router make, I see your point, you can never discount your router, even reloading firmware can help, but IDNet supplied routers are nothing extra special from anything else you can buy, they just come with the settings already on board. Its not like Sky where you can only use a Sky router (in theory) as its really hard to extract the user name and password. Last time I looked they provided Netgear DG834G's anyway.

I guess my point was that if you have an IDNet supplied router, the onus is even more on IDNet to sort it out.

[Gary]

I guess my point was that if you have an IDNet supplied router, the onus is even more on IDNet to sort it out.

Ahh I see your point, I need more coffee to get my head in gear

[Lance]

what I expect as a customer of ANY broadband/phone service provider is:

They look for the obvious and run basic diagnostics their end and check their network.
They check to see if anyone else is experiencing a similar problem during the period of time the problem occurs/occurred.
They contact BT to find out whether there is anything they might have done to cause the problem.
They get BT to check the exchange.
They get BT to check the line.

Its pretty obvious that this is a unique problem not at IDNet's end because otherwise we would have lots of similar complaints on here. The last two would cost you something like £180 if there is no fault BT's side of the master socket, which is why IDNet like to get customers to run various tests and even swap out hardware when possible to try and save the customer money.

My take on this whole thread is that there has been a lot of moaning about lack of OOH support (in which case why sign up with IDNet?), but its unlikely in this case (any any other similar cases) having OOH help available would make any difference. Additionally, some input to this thread has been purposely trying to stir things up which isn't very helpful at all when there is an issue being discussed.

Finally, Tina, if a connection to the internet is that importantant to you, as has already been mentioned in the thread you should get an enhanced care package, or either a back up line or alternative method of access such as a 3g stick. I know you've said you shouldn't have to but that poor argument could be applied to all sort of things. It just boils down to how important your connection is to you.

[pctech]

Trouble is Lance I don't think Enhanced Care is offered on consumer packages?

[T_M_D]

Its pretty obvious that this is a unique problem not at IDNet's end because otherwise we would have lots of similar complaints on here. The last two would cost you something like £180 if there is no fault BT's side of the master socket, which is why IDNet like to get customers to run various tests and even swap out hardware when possible to try and save the customer money.

My take on this whole thread is that there has been a lot of moaning about lack of OOH support (in which case why sign up with IDNet?), but its unlikely in this case (any any other similar cases) having OOH help available wouldn't make any difference. Additionally, some input to this thread has been purposely trying to stir things up which isn't very helpful at all when there is an issue being discussed.

Finally, Tina, if a connection to the internet is that importantant to you, as has already been mentioned in the thread you should get an enhanced care package, or either a back up line or alternative method of access such as a 3g stick. I know you've said you shouldn't have to but that poor argument could be applied to all sort of things. It just boils down to how important your connection is to you.

Sorry, I totally disagree with everything you say!

[Lance]

Its not, but there is nothing stopping consumers paying for a business package and adding it on. It just depends how important the line is. I know, for example, if I ran a business from home I would have two lines with different providers. If I was to start working from home 5 days a week, I would certainly consider a business package even though I've got an office I can go to in the event of a failure.

[Lance]

Sorry, I totally disagree with everything you say!

Fair enough - you're entitled to your views and opinions.

[T_M_D]

Miriam is working on this for me, it was good to get an email from her and it has reassured me somewhat.

Rik and others on here I know have been trying their best to get me some help for me over the last few days and so a big thank you to them for that and their continuing support.

I realise that I have not behaved on a couple of occasions within the rules and etiquette of this forum and so I am sorry for any offence caused to anyone.

I will behave better on here - but I will continue to air my views and disagree where I hold an opposing view :-)

[Rik]

That's all we ask, Tina, disagree but don't let's fall out - we're all customers at the end of the day.

[Simon]

Thanks, Tina.  Hopefully you'll get some answers today. 

[Tacitus]

Pleased you're getting some progress Tina.  Let us know the outcome.