UPC 20mb struggling to load pages

AFC_1903

For the last 4 or 5 days my house has been having a lot of trouble with our net connection. 20mb line UPC, close to Cork City Centre.

Pages regularly spend ages waiting for sites/content, but not every time. I have a paid radio subscription for radio commentery of my teams matches and yesterday couldn't use it as it was spending far more time inoperable than working, as was the same systems text commentery, and Sky Sports Score Centre. I ended up having to watch Aertel on the TV for score updates on my match. A few minutes ago it timed out when I tried to go from one page of a boards.ie thread to the next, and it does so regularly when on various messageboards/forums etc. I've not been able to use gmail chat in this time, and regularly have to take multiple attempts to load e-mails in yahoo mail. YouTube videos take forever to begin to load and many other sites are struggling to operate. We've had the connection for just over a month, and have had no such problems prior to this.

When I run a speedtest it takes AGES to load (a minute!?) then tells me i've a 58ms ping, 3600 kbps up and 800 kbps up connection. Grand in theory, but I clicked a youtube link earlier then nipped to the shop to find it was still waiting for (amusingly) pms.youtube.com!

There problems are appearing on Vista and XP on two different laptops. We mainly use wireless, though I also get the same issues when using the XP laptop on a wired connection. I shall be testing it with Ubuntu later today. Web browsers used are both Firefox and IE - and last two versions of each at that! Anti-virus is up-to-date and scans reveal nothing.

I had initially reckoned it to be a router problem (we're using the one we were given by UPC) but was talking to a friend in the southern suburbs of the city an hour ago, and he said he'd been having the same problems. This may be a fluke, but I have my doubts...


Does anyone know of anything that may be causing this, or have anything that will help?

Much appreciated,

AFC_1903



Oh, and it was 20-25 seconds of waiting to see the preview of this post - but hey, at least it worked!

Tallon

Ive the same package and mine has been doin the same a bit the last couple of days. Im in Kildare though

Although yesterday my torrents peaked at 1.5Meg so i was pretty happy about that, the must be working on the lines........

AFC_1903

Yeah, my DL speeds are OK (I don't use torrents, just RS), but when you can only get one or two pages to load per minute, that becomes less important.

It's wierd though, i'd expect either a fully working service or an utterly sh*gged non-working one, not a half 'n' half one...

Irishpimpdude

Sound like a DNS problem to me try http://www.opendns.com/ its free, and i had the same prob with ibb and i have never switched back to there dns servers...

Marlow

It's either DNS or simply too many tcp sessions open on either the line or the CATV headend.

First case can be solved by trying another DNS as suggested above. Second is simply down to all ye' PtP leachers and unlikely to be fixed.

/M

JoseJones

Sounds very similar to my problem, I'm in Limerick city. My results from speedtest.net are 45ms ping, 582 kb/s down and 1313 kb/s up using the frankfurt server. I also pay for their 20 Mb BB.

I'm going to email them now and see what they say.

Irishpimpdude

JoseJones wrote: »

Sounds very similar to my problem, I'm in Limerick city. My results from speedtest.net are 45ms ping, 582 kb/s down and 1313 kb/s up using the frankfurt server. I also pay for their 20 Mb BB.

I'm going to email them now and see what they say.

Why are u using the frankfurt server? and not an irish one

Tallon

Because thas what NTL tell you to do believe it or not....

Irishpimpdude

Tallon wrote: »

Because thas what NTL tell you to do believe it or not....

Really wtf, lol are they routing connections through frankfurt?

Tallon

In case anyones thinking of ringing them, this is the speil you'll be faced with:

1: The classic "Have you tried turning it on and off"
2: Your PC / Laptop may be too old to handle BB
3: "Go to www.speedtest.net and click on Frankfurt, its a more accurate point"
4: Plug out the router and plug straight into the modem
5: "Try restarting your PC"
6: "We'll send an engineer out in 2weeks and if they find a problem there will be a €10 downgrade fee"


Their service is amazing!!!!!!!

AFC_1903

OK, now it gets wierd. It was working problem free last night from about 2am til 8am (I was up all night for no particular reason).

Now it's utterly banjaxed again - several mins of trying to open my e-mail

I was going to do the DNS thing but was uncomfortable with adjusting the settings in case I erred while doing so - it'd mean they could turn round and blame me. Figured that i'd wait a few days before doing this, but after last night reckoned it'd not be needed - that it was obviously a temp problem

OK, now it's working grand again - less than 5 mins after I started typing this while doing (or initially trying to do other net-stuff).


Aaargh!

JoseJones

I tried the opendns thing, but it's still just as slow as ever. Have you contacted UPC OP? I sent them an email on customer.support@upc.ie but haven't had a response yet, I won't hold my breath either.
This seems to be a fairly common problem, there's quite a few threads in this forum discussing it.
The strange thing is my next door neighbour has the exact same setup as me, 20Mb BB and their speeds are fine.

AFC_1903

Not yet, as I figured with their reputation for **** service I was better off asking here. Pretty much knew if I phoned I'd get asked stupid questions by unqualified staff reading questions from a set list (not a slur on their staff at all btw, but a slur on their way of operating their business), before they'd ask me to pay to get someone to have a look at it. Also, i'd end up getting angry at them over the phone, and that does no good to anyone! I'll e-mail them in a few days if the problem persists.

All PC's (of more than-good-enough-for-bb spec) had been rebooted many times, both router and cable modem have been rebooted, and I had used the speedtest on several different server locations. Also, the Xbox 360 was not always able to connect to the net.
The speed tests always gave good speeds though - speeds that were no doubt accurate, as data transfer rates (when data was actually being transferred) were grand, but not in keeping with the actual time to get pages to load

If I couldn't use it at all, in any way, shape, or form i'd have been onto them ages ago. It's the fact that it's just the browsing that's (so often) affected, while I can download grand that's confusing. And sometimes I/we can surf problem free, but for days prior to now we could barely get pages to load.

It's now working awa grand again (hopefully it stays like this, but I won't hold my breath). I really don't understand it.

AFC_1903

It seems to be working OK now. A friend suggested that they may have rebooted servers causing problems. No idea how accurate this is, but so long as the problems don't return (have I tempted fate?) i'm happy.

Thanks for all your help, information and suggestions!

AFC_1903