Should I upgrade my line from 1 to 3Mb with these stats?

Matt Bauer

I'm wondering whether I should upgrade my line from 1 to 3Mb with the following stats, as reported by my Eircon (pun intended) Netopia router:

SN Margin (dB): 11.10 (Downstream), 13.00 (Upstream).
Line Attenuation (dB): 63.00 (Downstream), 31.50 (Upstream)

At the moment my pings are around 30ms, never dropping below 25ms.

Any advice?

Matt Bauer

I did a line test with Vodafone and they say I could get their 3Mb package, but I'm worried whether it would be stable, since I did some research and it seems like my SN margins may be low?

Xcellor

Your downstream attenuation is very bad. Almost as bad as it could get... You must be miles from exchange or really bad cabling.

Anything more than 1 mb will be hard to achieve...

X

Matt Bauer

Xcellor, I am 3 miles from the exchange. The engineers who did the install said the lines in this area were "good quality".

lucernarian

The max an ADSL2 modem can measure is 63.5 dB/31.5dB attenuation. The attenuation value would be higher if you call eircom and arranged a test (if they bother to arrange it that is). I strongly suggest you don't go for 3 mbps.

My line is 4 miles long and has better stats than that. And I still declined perlico's offer of free 3mbps bb for the price of 1.

Sponge Bob

You won't get above 2 and it is likely to be a bit unstable and with higher pings , is it worth trading a stable 1mbit for that ?? Your s/n margin is too tight to go any higher ..

Matt Bauer

Sponge Bob wrote: »

You won't get above 2 and it is likely to be a bit unstable and with higher pings , is it worth trading a stable 1mbit for that ?? Your s/n margin is too tight to go any higher ..

I'm afraid you may be right. I ran my stats through one of these ADSL2+ range calculators, and it said I can't get more than 2100kbps.

To be honest, 1Mb download is fine. It's the 128kbps upload speed that is killing me. Even sending an email with a few small photos or uploading a 20MB file (not large by todays standards) takes forever and clogs up my connection while I'm doing it.

Heck, even my 3 Mobile Broadband dongle (we all know how terrible they are) gives me at least 0.5Mbps upload speed, much faster than Eircom.

mukki

try uplugging things from the phone sockets, and moving the router to other points if possibal
make sure the the filters are plugged into the wall, i have seen people pluggin the filter into the skybox, they only work in 1 direction.

sure order the 3mb and get the tech dudes to slow it down if you have problems


i got a customer who is on a perfectly stable 1.7mb line, that won't sync at 2mb or higher, she is paying for 3mb, but its only €5 extra, and youtube plays most videos without stopping

Matt Bauer

mukki, thanks for the advice. Called Eircom and they said they could give that a try, setting it at 2Mb or less and seeing if it remains stable for an extra fiver a month. If it doesn't work out I can go back.

Matt Bauer

Finally got around to calling Eircom yesterday. They upgraded my line to 3mb. Latency has only increased slightly, pinging Irish servers is around 50ms up from 30ms before.




Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 2048 256
SN Margin (dB) 8.70 12.00
Line Attenuation (dB) 63.00 31.50
CRC Errors 0 0

It's much faster now. YouTube videos load without buffering and pages load more quickly. Only had it for a day, but so far it's completely stable. By the way, this is the worst the line attenuation goes. It usually sits at 62.00 or 62.5.

Edit: My connection is now slightly over twice as fast as before looking at the speedtest.net results, and it feels more than twice as fast as pages load significantly quicker. It just feels much "snappier". Basically before speedtest.net was telling me I had 0.75mb down and 0.1mb up. Now I'm getting 1.75 down and 0.2 up.

Matt Bauer

Another observation: before I sometimes got CRC errors. So far these are completely gone. Also, while my line was still at 1Mb, if I downloaded anything from the internet, browsing was very slow to the point of frustration and pings were erratic. Now, even when downloading files, I can still go to websites without a huge slowdown and my pings remain much more stable.

Not sure why upgrading the speed would have gotten rid of CRC errors though, would have thought if anything they'd get worse.

Matt Bauer

I'm just wondering, would disconnecting the micro filter and connecting the modem directly, as I do not use the phone line for calls anyway, have the potential to improve the speed even further? I am asking as it seems to me like the micro filter would have the potential to reduce the amount of signal getting through.