I have measured the download speed using both Speedtest and Think Broadband utilities over the course of a 2 week period with only 1 machine connected and all other internet activity closed down.
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How can I increase slow O2 Broadband speed?
I recently switched from Orange to O2 and have failed to consistently get more than 10 Mbps download speed despite O2 claiming that there has been no connection loss and 17.9 Mbps is getting to the router. I have tried resetting routers and changing wireless channels, as well as alternative options using both the supplied O2 wireless II router and my own Linksys WAG54GX2 SRX 200, ethernet cable and wireless, PC and Macbook Pro, but nothing seems to have a dramatic impact. Also, on about 20% of all occasions when I try and load a web page the system cannot even connect to the server after about 30 seconds of trying. My main system is a Macbook Pro, OS X 10.5.7 with Safari 4.02. I have a noise filter fitted on the line. Please help!
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Answers
Might be worth a phone call to them.
Have a look at www.bethere.co.uk and run a report on your line to see what they suggest you can get down the line.
Contention ratio will always affect a line - I have a user out in the sticks who can work happily during the day (during term time) but as soon as the kids get kicked out of school and get home, the speed drops to a crawl and he struggles to get anywhere.
Not yet I'm afraid as they don't seem to know although they did confirm that the noise profile has been set to 6dB and that this should be ok for my line as it is less than 1 Km from the exchange. I have now been referred to a technical specialist team, but I need to call them to progress and this may not be possible for a while given my work commitments.
I finally got through to O2 level 2 support and spoke to someone that knew what they were talking about. They talked me through how to tweak my ethernet settings on both PC and Mac (principally moving to 100 base TX full-duplex) and now I am getting over 15 Mbps download.
However, I cannot get this to replicate in wireless mode with even just one device connected, with typical download speeds remaining at around 9 Mbps on both PC and Mac. I have tried adjusting router channel settings (I have tried 1,2,6,8, 11 and 13 in manual mode and automatic) and I have tried switching between 802.11 b/g and 802.11 g, but no material impact.
Apparently contention ratio is 121, but this is one area where the O2 advisor seemed to have no idea! Not sure if it is still relevant now though given the boosted ethernet speed.
Any ideas on what to do next?
The Mac is less than 6 months old and is a 2.4 GHz Macbook Pro with all the latest updates installed I believe. The card is an AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x8D) and firmware is Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.91.19).
Having tested the ethernet connection for an hour or so now, I still get frequent and frustrating page loading problems (can't find server), but download speed is holding up at around 15 Mbps.
Your help really is very much appreciated.
Well, I seem to have made progress on both fronts.
Firstly I switched back to my Linksys WAG54GX2 SRX200 router and my wireless speeds are back up towards the ethernet speeds, with the added advantage that the range seems to be better as well.
Secondly I noticed that the slow web page loading problem seemed more prevalent on Safari, so I deleted a couple of library files, repaired the permissions and it seems to have improved. Time will tell, but I will close this question down in a couple of days if it stays like this.
Fingers crossed and many thanks for your help.
Glen
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by: alanhardistyPosted on 2009-08-10 at 14:00:14ID: 25064011
You may be connected at 17.9mb to the internet, but how many people are you sharing the line with (contention ratio)?
Please remember that your line may be shared by up to 50 other users and therefore you are all fighting for the bandwidth.
How are you measuring the download speed?
Have you used tools such as http://www.dslreports.com/