Connection Speed advice

[nicebikemate]

Hi there,

My partner and I are having some connection issues with our Sky broadband. Basically we're completely unable to stream (netflix and youtube) and my ping when gaming is 250ms+ to a server in London.

I suspect that the problem lies more in the crappy copper wires our connection runs through, pinging the router recieves a <1ms response, and was wondering if the information below is deemed acceptable. The 'guide' I was following (How to Diagnose your Slow Internet Connection) suggests that a Line Attenuation of >50db is unaceptable and that the noise marger should ideally be higher than 12db.

Can lowering the connection speed help to provide a more stable connection? That seems to make sense in my head but.....

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as at the moment we're paying for a service that we can't use :/

Apologies if any of the questions above make no sense technically but i'm not particularly technically minded.

Thanks in advance,

Rob and Kate

Port	Status	TxPkts	RxPkts	Collisions	Tx B/s	Rx B/s	Up Time
WAN	MER	224064	28710230	0	2147483647	2147483647	9:26:03
LAN	Down	0	0	0	0	0	394:38:34
WLAN	Up	30910154	22998184	0	2147483647	2147483647	394:38:17

ADSL Link	Downstream	Upstream
Connection Speed	3822 kbps	796 kbps
Line Attenuation	55.0 dB	33.4 dB
Noise Margin	5.7 dB	9.8 dB

[User05]

The 'guide' I was following (How to Diagnose your Slow Internet Connection) suggests that a Line Attenuation of >50db is unaceptable and that the noise marger should ideally be higher than 12db.

It doesn't really work like that.

Line attenuation suggests the length & quality of the line; the higher the attenuation, the longer the line typically is and vice versa.

Sky typically set three different target noise margins - 3dB (quite rare), 6dB (relatively common these days) and 7dB (again, common). It's hard to confirm with router stats, but if yours sits around 6dB after a reboot then your line is likely set to 6dB target SNR. Thus, the line will train in with the best sync speed for the conditions at that target SNR.

Can lowering the connection speed help to provide a more stable connection? That seems to make sense in my head but.....

If your line is pretty unstable with the current settings, then things can be tweaked. The uptime is over 9hrs so it doesn't look that unstable really, but could still be generating errors that will cause a drop in throughout / bad latency. A call to Sky can confirm if this is the case.

Let's just confirm the basics first off:

- What exchange are you on? SamKnows - Telephone Exchange Search if you're not sure.
- Any issues with your landline, such as audible noise on calls?
- Take the stats from the test socket (link to follow) with just a filter and the short grey dsl cable that Sky provided going to the router.
- Once you've got the router connected to the test socket, connect up an ethernet cable from your machine to the router and then ping bbc.co.uk from command prompt and post the results.