Good Broadband - eircom not cutting it.

chrislad

I'm basically getting crap speeds on my 2meg line with eircom. It's costing me nearly 60 a month between line rental, and to be honest, I'm not getting value for money.

My needs are simple. I want it fast, and I want wireless as well. My main PC is wired up but I've a Macbook and another girl uses wireless in the house. I also run my Xbox 360 off it, but not at the same time as the PC. If I start a download, my connection crawls along (even if the download is as small as 10kb/s which is piss poor anyways)

Suggestions? I'm in Castletroy, Limerick. I don't care about the phone as I have a mobile and I can use VoiP through that also.

dub45

chrislad wrote:

I'm basically getting crap speeds on my 2meg line with eircom. It's costing me nearly 60 a month between line rental, and to be honest, I'm not getting value for money.

My needs are simple. I want it fast, and I want wireless as well. My main PC is wired up but I've a Macbook and another girl uses wireless in the house. I also run my Xbox 360 off it, but not at the same time as the PC. If I start a download, my connection crawls along (even if the download is as small as 10kb/s which is piss poor anyways)

Suggestions? I'm in Castletroy, Limerick. I don't care about the phone as I have a mobile and I can use VoiP through that also.

What speeds are you actually getting? Have your speeds ever been up to your expectations? Have you done any diagnosis to see what exactly the problem might be? With all disconnected except the wired pc what speed do you actually get? What are your line stats?

chrislad

Barely getting 1mb/s according to isptest.com. Had eircom out looking and they said it was fine. I had a 2meg connection at home and it was way faster than this. I've done everything from firmware updates to wiping my PC and it's still slow. A 2meg line should not slow down horribly if you start to download something.

thebman

chrislad wrote:

Barely getting 1mb/s according to isptest.com. Had eircom out looking and they said it was fine. I had a 2meg connection at home and it was way faster than this. I've done everything from firmware updates to wiping my PC and it's still slow. A 2meg line should not slow down horribly if you start to download something.

Your line might not be able to handle 2Mbps. Some of the others know what you need to check to find out the quality of the line and get an idea of what it can handle.

I think its line attenuation and distance from your exchange that you need to worry about. Might be something else aswell.

chrislad

It's not my line. It's a new house in a new area with a new exchange, and it's a well built up new area with excellent broadband support.

dub45

chrislad wrote:

It's not my line. It's a new house in a new area with a new exchange, and it's a well built up new area with excellent broadband support.

Well if it is not your line what is it? Have you checked your line stats? Just because a line is new there is not guarantee that it is perfect - its a long journey from the house to the exchange with plenty of opportunity for bad solders, iffy connections, leaks etc along the way. What speed are you syncing at? What are your line stats? Available on the main page of the Netopia in the form xx/yy. Have you any opportunity to borrow another router and try it on the line?

chrislad

Primary DNS Server
213.94.190.194
dns1.cwm.dublin.eircom.net
Secondary DNS Server
213.94.190.236
dns2.cra.dublin.eircom.net
Speed
2048/256 (kbps)
Line Attenuation
35/22 dB

dub45

chrislad wrote:

Primary DNS Server
213.94.190.194
dns1.cwm.dublin.eircom.net
Secondary DNS Server
213.94.190.236
dns2.cra.dublin.eircom.net
Speed
2048/256 (kbps)
Line Attenuation
35/22 dB

Your 'sync' is perfect your line stats are excellent so apparently there is very little if anything to blame Eircom on - there must be something amiss in the rest of your system.

chrislad

Any idea what it could be then? I can ring eircom for a replacement router if needs be. Main programs I use are Firefox (Mac and PC), BitComet (PC), Xbox Live, MSN Messenger.

Marlow

dub45 wrote:

Your 'sync' is perfect your line stats are excellent so apparently there is very little if anything to blame Eircom on - there must be something amiss in the rest of your system.

Or the exchange is overcontended. Eircom is anyhow in general.

/Martin

kmick

I pay Euro63 for a 3mb line and the phone line with all local calls and calls to the UK free. It is with BT and I am very happy with it.

Marlow

One thing, that you can check is Eircom's own speedtest.

If you get full whack of the eircom speedtest, but bad speeds of irish isp speedtest or speedtest.net, it might be an idea, to change to another provider, that sells bitstream.

Bitstream providers resell eircom alright, but the internet feed does not come from eircom. Eircom feeds the bitstream dsl connections to these providers over a direct fiber pipe and the internet feed comes from their own peers then.

Good example is Tuam, which is completely overcontended with eircom, but if you are on another provider, you can nearly have uncontended speeds.

/Martin

watty

Are you using WiFi? At 11Mbps it only can just manage 3Mbps broadband, less if more than 2 people using WiFi. It can fall back to 1Mbps if signal is poor. Just because the WiFi Router is 54Mbps, 108, 125 etc doesn't mean that's the mode it's using. If any device is using 802.11b, unless it is an advanced MIMO router, your whole WiFi is limited to 11Mbps (= 3Mbps for only 1 user)

chrislad

WiFi is used but not often. One girl has WiFi and that's the only one that's used regularly. The Xbox is wired, the PS3 is wired (but barely used), the PC is wired.

Will have a look at some tests and see once I get home.

dub45

Marlow wrote:

Or the exchange is overcontended. Eircom is anyhow in general.

/Martin

If Eircom was overcontended in general boards would be full of complaints about Eircom speeds - it isnt so your claim is wrong - its as simple as that.

dub45

chrislad wrote:

WiFi is used but not often. One girl has WiFi and that's the only one that's used regularly. The Xbox is wired, the PS3 is wired (but barely used), the PC is wired.

Will have a look at some tests and see once I get home.

Your best bet for the moment is just to connect the pc to the modem by ethernet and do your diagnosis from there. If contention was the issue I would expect to see some complaints from other exchange users on here but there arent and if was contention then I doubt if download speeds would drop the way you say they do - you would more likely be getting slow speeds at peak times and normal speeds outside of that.

Have you ever messed around with any of the settings in your router? Have you set up port forwarding? Have you tried doing a factory reset (little hole at the back) just to clear any settings that might have crept in?

chrislad

The only settings I've changed was the Wireless channel from 6 to 13 as there was interference. Not changed anything else, but I shall do a reset once I get home. I'll disconnect everything, bar the PC and do the various tests and post results here.

dub45

Have you asked if any of your neighbours are having similar problems?

chrislad

According to irishisptest.com, I have 1.57Mbps download, and upload is 65.3kbps. That's with nothing happening elsewhere. No wireless. No downloads. Nothing. eircom speedtest for the same scenario on a large file is 195.52 KBps.

With one download turned on at 4kb/s down and 2kb/s up, I got the following results. From irishisptest.com, I got 1.74 upload and 123kbps download. From eircom, I got 194.83.

The internet was pretty slow to react at this point. However, I did notice something in BitComet, in the bottom right corner.

Blocked: 86.41.115.59, with a balloon message of 'Your listen port is unavailable to public domain peers, please check your Firewall and NAT Router configurations'.

Now, I'm only using Windows firewall, and I don't think there are NAT settings in the Netopia router eircom give you. The listen port in BitComet is 25481 if that means anything but I think it's random.

Any ideas?

mickzer

The Netopia 2247 that Eircom give you has Nat and a firewall.You have to go to Expert mode and Configure for the NAT.

mickzer.

chrislad

What settings do I need to change? I only see a list of options, the ability to design a custom service and a static NAT with 3 options of my home PC (Chris-PC) and two IP addresses.

mickzer

I can't really remember how I did it but I know I got a lot of help from this page:

http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

mickzer.

chrislad

I did everything there and I'm still getting a Yellow error. It's saying that the IP that is blocked is the IP in the IP address section of the router. Any ideas?

dub45

Can we take it at this stage that your problems are all to do with your router settings for downloading torrents and in fact have nothing at all to do with your Eircom connection?

chrislad

I think I said that already. Regardless, yep, I suspect that's the case. I've followed the links I was given for port forwarding and for setting up the NAT and they link didn't work. The thing I find strange is that the ipconfig gives an ip address of the PC as 192.168.whatever, and the router IP is 81.something, where the address to log onto the router is the standard 192.168.1.254

chrislad

Never mind, got it sorted. Now to see if it makes a difference.