Hey Geeks

 

I’m currently in the throes of a broadband investigation and could use some input from you geniuses.

I live out in the country, about 10 minutes’ drive from the nearest city and 4km from the nearest whisper cabinet. I receive ADSL internet from Slingshot and use a Draytek Vigor 2830vn Modem/Router.

My speeds have always been poor (obviously) but the first few times I changed internet plans with Slingshot my speeds did increase. For the last year or so now my speeds have been sitting under or around the 1.2Mbps area with a ping of 45ms to Auckland.

Everything was going swimmingly until just over a month and a half ago; suddenly I started experiencing slower speeds around peak times which progressively got slower until I was experiencing serious drop outs fairly regularly.

This meant browsing the Internet became near impossible (let alone gaming or using teamspeak/skype). I performed isolation tests (removing filters and plugging the phone line directly into the modem and connecting only 1 pc, switching phone jacks etc.) and no difference was made, I’d still get crazy ping fluctuations of up to 2000ms and speeds down to a few Kilobytes per second.

I called Slingshot and requested that Interleaving be turned on, this resulted in my non-peak speeds increasing to 2.2mbps and my ping to Auckland increasing to 65ms (which is to be expected).

While I have now seen a massive improvement in speed during these peak hours of 6pm to 10pm weekdays and all day Saturday, the speed still drops to 0.8mpbs at times and quality of connection (which is the key here) is still poor, resulting in bad VoIP quality etc.

However, my upload speed has remained a rock solid 0.45mbps throughout the whole affair.

I ran a test using the diagnostic at www.myconnectionserver.com and received the following results:

 

A basic analysis:
http://i442.photobucket.com/albums/qq145/Incindre/myconnectionserver1.jpg

A Graphed analysis:

http://mcsiad.visualware.com/myspeed/db/report?id=974584

 
(Hyperlinks don't seem to be working sorry, just copy paste!)

Note that in the graphed analysis, the upload speed is fairly stable and the wait between TCP packets is acceptably low. But it’s a completely different story for download. As you can see the wait times between packets at times are gigantic and the stability of the speed is very eratic.

Do any of you Net Boffins know whether these download problems are being caused by hardware (exchange/cabinet etc.) or if there is something more sinister at work?

Any insight into this would be awesome (and do check out that site if you are a novice, it explains a whole heap of things and has some very useful tools).

Cheers,
Incindre