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Re: [LUG] Broadband - recent changes Exeter

 
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Kevin Lucas wrote:


On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 18:22 +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote:

On Mon, 24 Oct 2011, Kevin Lucas wrote:


On Fri, 2011-10-21 at 21:01 +0100, James Kilty wrote:

On 21/10/11 19:01, Simon Waters wrote:

Noted that:

Exeter has FTTC in some areas.

Sowton offers C&W LLU. Sowton previously wasn't upgraded despite the
huge number of business customers because the uptake wasn't huge - I
presume that someone else has cables (Virgin?) around the industrial
estate - so Sowton customers with BT are still on 8Mbps maximum. After
some searching, and reading about corporate takeovers and failed deals,
it seems basically this means Demon Internet and a few other reseller
will sell you ADSL 2+ for the exchange.


Interesting. We have FTTC the nearest of which is in Townshend, less
than a mile away. Plusnet say they could give me 6Mbps - I get 3Mbps at
a good time with ADSL - well my router sometimes says this - I mostly
get a steady 2Mbps download. The exchange (Leedstown) is not set up for
ADSL2+ and if it was, I might get more than the FTTC would. So Demon
cannot upgrade me as they don't do it from fibre. The exchange was one
of the first in Cornwall with few users. I wonder if any have signed up
to the faster rates, especially in the village of Leedstown, which is
fairly compact and must have less than 100 houses.

I could do with a faster line as wife and daughter stream TV and films.
They can't do it at the same time.

Have you mtr installed? I think it runs in a GUI or command line?
it gives you an idea where the lossy routers are
if you can run it in cron say every hour and point the output to a file
you can see what times are bad for you and where the errors are.
examples are here
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/finding-out-a-bad-or-simply-overloaded-network-link-with-linuxunix-oses.html


It's a good tool, but what you are you going to do with the output of it?

Because basically, there's f-all you can do, short of switching ISPs
if/when you think there's an issue somewhere.


just the point of the thread I thought!
mtr is just a fancy traceroute program - the command-line version is usually in the mtr-tiny package. 

But what does this tell you:

HOST: yakko                       Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1. watertower.drogon.net         0.0%    10    0.2   1.6   0.2  14.0   4.3
  2. lns18.the.dsl.enta.net        0.0%    10   42.5  16.3  10.1  42.5  12.3
  3. gi1-8.the.dist.dsl.enta.net   0.0%    10    9.8  11.3   9.8  21.9   3.7
  4. te2-2.telehouse-east3.dsl.en  0.0%    10   10.0  10.1   9.8  10.5   0.2
  5. te5-2.telehouse-east.core.en  0.0%    10   10.0  11.2  10.0  20.8   3.4
  6. linx1.lon1.as8553.net         0.0%    10   10.4  17.6  10.2  69.3  18.6
  7. so-0-3-0-0.shef1.as8553.net   0.0%    10   39.5  20.5  17.2  39.5   7.4
  8. dsr0-shef.drogon.net          0.0%    10   17.2  17.1  16.8  17.3   0.2
  9. unicorn.drogon.net            0.0%    10   17.1  17.2  17.0  17.7   0.2
What happened at hop 7 - why does it appear slower than hops after it? Why is hop3 quicker than hop 2? 

So feel free to sit there and watch mtr, and do speed tests, etc...
I don't think it will make any difference and very few ISPs will actually listen you you.
Also, anything using icmp pings is prone to dropping packets anyway - some routers will deliberately drop ICMP Ping packets under high load. Does that mean the Internet is slow? Not always. So you can't really tell. 

Gordon

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