[philthomas]

Originally Posted by MJM

Dude, I run servers that could easily burn my line and I cannot get the speed from them... Ping is also always horrible.

I should note here that I live in a student area and a lot of people use Virgin purely because when you are five people or more in a house you need a speedy line and the most BT offers is like 5 megs or something.
But because it's stupid cable internet (hello inferior technology) and there's not enough bandwidth assigned to the area, we are constantly slowed down.

Also note that Virgin is very well aware of this fact and does nothing about it and thus should kill itself.

Yeah I can see that being a problem ....... all you can do in your case is to complaim, complain, complain ..... never bother phoning their Indian Call Centre, put everything in writing ....... eventually they will upgrade their hardware, but only after much pushing

[MJM]

I got like twenty or thirty quid back last year, but that ain't ish compared to what I actually pay.

[smakky]

You've probably resolved this by now, looking at the date of your post, but I'll share my expereineces on this for you and maybe others. This seems like an intermittent issue (maybe water intrusion, excessive splices, corrosion, something that makes your line devalue from the optimal) in your connectivity back to where your DSL service originates from. I have the same problem with it being almost the same speeds as your result here in the U.S. after the telephone line that carries my DSL service was dug up and spliced. I am 2.4 km from the telephone company's interface. The bump in line impedance changed the characteristics of the line and now I get this very slow, "upside down" undesired service. I have asked to be switched to a different pair, but I am currently in a rural area and my service is what it is as there is no alternative except for satellite. BT should check the line that carries your DSL signal to you to insure that its characteristics are optimized, and if they're not, they should try to get you onto another pair that may work better. Another thing you can do is to eliminate everything downstream from your DSL modem - just have the telephone pair run straight into your modem without your telephones hanging behind it to see if that gives you an appreciable change in speed. Something in your house may also be changing your line characteristics. If so, then you should correct that, or eliminate it, yourself. Here in the U.S. the telephone company would charge me for ruling this out. Good luck getting past "customer service" or a "help desk" to someone who will listen to you and not send you off on an incorrect tangent. Also, if BT follows some of our business models, there are agreements between carriers to discount physical services, such as the telephone line "last mile" services and use the same infrastructure to deliver the signal to you if you use a competitive service. I cannot get a competitive service (I'd love to), but I'd probably still get the same quality of service if I did.

Originally Posted by palmermcfc

ok, first post here
I live in Manchester, UK and have a broadband connection with BT. 1 or 2 weeks in a month my internet is fine, I am far away from my exchange so usually look at around a 1Mb connection, speed test giving 700-800Kb download with 300-400 upload. Then the rest of the month it looks like this:

this leads to me believing that bt is purposely cutting my download speed. This isn't a computer related problem, speed test runs similar results on all 3 computers in the house, no bandwith hogging software like torrents are being used.

So basically what i am wondering is, is am i right that the problem is that the ISP's end? also I don't seem to be able to get cable connection through virgin media so if i went to another ISP which went through my BT line such as sky, would the problems persist?

Many thanks in advance