How do you mean, mate? Bear with me, I'm not at all techie. Its a modem/router magic box. I can get into the settings on my laptop, if that's what you mean, but once there my eyes tend to glaze over...
As I’m in the sticks we get 35mb with sky, my sky q mini despite being above the router always losing connection. We are changing to FTP on Tuesday and that gives 149 minimum they said so fingers crossed it sorts.
The part of all this that bothers me is the extent of the speed drop. Technician does his test with his big chunky modem and shows me 83mbps. I immediately do the Ookla test on my laptop, over wifi, and get 32mbps.
And even with the ethernet cable just now, I get 51mbps
That's a big drop, isn't it?
@golfaddick funny enough I did ask him if he could give me a print-out and he said it had no way to do that. Trouble is, this outfit is owned by the country's richest oligarch. Even I know when I'm beaten :-)
All this talk of superfast speeds 176mbps, a gig a second - pah!
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
Probably better off now seeing if you can get a decent 5G signal at the mansion Bob, faster than the fibre anyway I think?
Depends what you mean by fibre, you have FTTC and FTTP. FTTP can do a gig.
How do you mean, mate? Bear with me, I'm not at all techie. Its a modem/router magic box. I can get into the settings on my laptop, if that's what you mean, but once there my eyes tend to glaze over...
Most routers are accessible using your web browser, they often have a page where you can see the sync speed of your line. This should indicate what speed you should be expecting, you could google on how to access.
All this talk of superfast speeds 176mbps, a gig a second - pah!
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
Probably better off now seeing if you can get a decent 5G signal at the mansion Bob, faster than the fibre anyway I think?
can I just say that I have zero technical knowledge or ability. I can't get my head around it. The only thing I know about a cable is how to plug it in, and the only think I know about a router is where it is and how to turn it off and turn it on again, but I've read every post on this thread and enjoyed it. I'm still clueless, but I've enjoyed it..
Unless you're playing some specialist computer games, increasing line speed is like getting a new car simply because it can theoretically go at 200mph. Even though you rarely drive outside of the city!
Faster line speed supports applications that do not yet exist or maybe permits dozens of devices in the home to download information at the same time.
But if you only want to watch the footie on the tele, its not much help.
Here we are plagued by regular drop-outs which I suspect are the fault of Open Reach as they affect everyone in the street. I'd happily trade 30 MB of speed for a reliable service.
I really hope FTTP comes to Sidcup soon, Uploading for work is my issue, I’m only getting 4mbps and a colleague Erith way on FTTP is getting 80-100mbps upload. The company will need to contribute though hopefully!
If the signal/circuit coming into your house does not give decent upload or download speeds no matter what modem or router you have it won’t matter you can’t polish a turd, with a wi-fi or a cabled solution within your house. You will have more chance of good speeds if you have a full fibre circuit, ISP end to your house not a part fibre part copper link, which of course costs £. If you don’t have kids streaming films and playing games all the time for basic application such as internet browsing, Netflix etc... you should be ok (realise remote areas in UK still suffer). Once the UK has 5g saturation and the costs are not excessive fixed line links into your house will no longer be required and sky dishes removed. However parts of the UK still suffer with 3/4g signals so we are a fair way off. Not sure on how Prague is doing though.
Maybe somebody can confirm but I was told that a good VPN can actually prevent internet speed throttling by your ISP. I am a bit sceptical because it is another device that potentially slows things down. However I use Express VPN and there is no noticeable slowdown for me when I use it.
This can work in principle because data throttling due to congestion is only applied to a specific type of internet traffic because your ISP can't slow down all traffic. As a VPN encrypts that traffic, it makes it impossible for your ISP to see it. And it can't slow down what it can't see.
This would not work if the reason for slowdown is not ISP speed throttling. I haven't really been able to test this as my speed is usually ok for my usage.
However parts of the UK still suffer with 3/4g signals so we are a fair way off. Not sure on how Prague is doing though.
The Czech Republic is very well advanced in one aspect of 5G. It has a large bunch of people who believe the one about Covid being spread by 5G. This is interesting because while the Czech Republic currently has an appallingly high level of Covid infections, it not only doesn't have 5G, it cannot even start the tender process for it all because they can't decide what to do about Huawei. Further, the bellends who believe this are particularly concentrated in the far north-east, where you'd often struggle to so much as complete a phone call on your mobile.
All this talk of superfast speeds 176mbps, a gig a second - pah!
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
I'm still on 2.5mbps down and 0.7up, and I don't even live in the back of beyond.
Unless you're playing some specialist computer games, increasing line speed is like getting a new car simply because it can theoretically go at 200mph. Even though you rarely drive outside of the city!
Faster line speed supports applications that do not yet exist or maybe permits dozens of devices in the home to download information at the same time.
But if you only want to watch the footie on the tele, its not much help.
Here we are plagued by regular drop-outs which I suspect are the fault of Open Reach as they affect everyone in the street. I'd happily trade 30 MB of speed for a reliable service.
Funnily enough I thought similar when I was on 30mb (the maximum I could get where I was) but my fiancee and I were having issues in calls if both in at the same time.
Obviously that is more than enough for decent downloads, but what I stupidly didn't realise was just how important upload speed was, and that is often a very small fraction of the download speed.
Since moving to a place with 200mb/s, we haven't had any issues at all!
All this talk of superfast speeds 176mbps, a gig a second - pah!
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
I'm still on 2.5mbps down and 0.7up, and I don't even live in the back of beyond.
Is this why it took you so long to do the bitesize shenanigan posts sometimes?
You using MAC or Windows @PragueAddick and what Laptop? Do a scan for other wifi networks as channel can definitely make a difference.
and make sure you have the firmware up to date
Always Mac. This laptop is brand new too, but the same problems occurred with the older Macbook Pro it replaced. If I listen to music on my Sonos box via an iPad, I get occasional but very irritating drop-outs. Made me glad I didn't listen to the guy who sold it me, suggesting I could bin my hifi as "this is the future".
A quick look at the drop-down menu shows right now 7 other wifi networks my Mac can pick up.
That said, in my office, with internet provided by UPC, the cable operator, none of this shit happened. Occasionally it went down, but we'd call UPC and they'd admit that it was a general outage in the vicinity. But otherwise, rock solid and fast. And there we were in 6 storey old style apartment block, typical of the area. Here, it's detached houses all around and a lot of older people occupying them (the porn baron being an exception :-) )
I will certainly investigate channels using @Big_Bad_World webpage, although I now recall a techie looked at that not so long ago
I think the overall takeout, for which I am grateful is that if I can get at least 20mbps with VPN on, then any buffering on iPlayer is not the fault of the line speed, and increasing it is unlikely to solve the problem,
30meg is plenty to stream HD TV and have mobiles, tablets, alexas and stuff like that connected and running fine. The faster the speed the more bandwidth so downloading will be faster however the speeds full fibre will give is essentially too fast for the electronics on the end of the bit of glass.
I'd always recommend to anyone to get the fibre option if offered, the reliability is far greater than having metal either aluminium or copper involved as we live in wet country and conducting metals don't mix well with water. And from a base level, fibre is easier amd quicker for engineers to fix than faults on the copper network.
Remember unless you are with Virgin or living in a full fibre city that has had the network provided by one of about a thousand alternate network providers such as gigaclear it is maintained by Openreach. If you speak to your service provider make sure they politely ask Openreach to have a look at their network performance data and proactively fix the problem even if that means closing the road outside of your house to do it
30meg is plenty to stream HD TV and have mobiles, tablets, alexas and stuff like that connected and running fine. The faster the speed the more bandwidth so downloading will be faster however the speeds full fibre will give is essentially too fast for the electronics on the end of the bit of glass.
I'd always recommend to anyone to get the fibre option if offered, the reliability is far greater than having metal either aluminium or copper involved as we live in wet country and conducting metals don't mix well with water. And from a base level, fibre is easier amd quicker for engineers to fix than faults on the copper network.
Remember unless you are with Virgin or living in a full fibre city that has had the network provided by one of about a thousand alternate network providers such as gigaclear it is maintained by Openreach. If you speak to your service provider make sure they politely ask Openreach to have a look at their network performance data and proactively fix the problem even if that means closing the road outside of your house to do it
That's a bit like suggesting South Eastern politely ask network Rail to fix those pesky signals at Lewisham!
30meg is plenty to stream HD TV and have mobiles, tablets, alexas and stuff like that connected and running fine. The faster the speed the more bandwidth so downloading will be faster however the speeds full fibre will give is essentially too fast for the electronics on the end of the bit of glass.
I'd always recommend to anyone to get the fibre option if offered, the reliability is far greater than having metal either aluminium or copper involved as we live in wet country and conducting metals don't mix well with water. And from a base level, fibre is easier amd quicker for engineers to fix than faults on the copper network.
Remember unless you are with Virgin or living in a full fibre city that has had the network provided by one of about a thousand alternate network providers such as gigaclear it is maintained by Openreach. If you speak to your service provider make sure they politely ask Openreach to have a look at their network performance data and proactively fix the problem even if that means closing the road outside of your house to do it
That's a bit like suggesting South Eastern politely ask network Rail to fix those pesky signals at Lewisham!
Not at all, as much as I like the analogy. The service providers and Openreach have good relationships besides that, if you are paying for something that keeps dropping out make a noise about it the people you pay your bill to are paying Openreach for the use of the network and luckily its generally a lot easier to remake a troublesome wet cable joint and renew cables than it is to do whatever is the problem at Lewisham
All this talk of superfast speeds 176mbps, a gig a second - pah!
Up until about a year ago I was putting up with 2mbps and BT wanted £50k to run fibre to the house - as you can imagine I told them where to shove their FTP. I switched to 4G and get a wopping 20mbps download and 10mbps upload - plus a ping of around 21ms. That'll do for me and more than enough to stream Netflix, general internet use and Echos all over the house!
Supposedly promised FTP at some point as part of the general rollout but I don't expect that in my lifetime!! The price of living in the back of beyond - bloody carrot crunchers!
I'm still on 2.5mbps down and 0.7up, and I don't even live in the back of beyond.
Is this why it took you so long to do the bitesize shenanigan posts sometimes?
(JOKE!!!)
Nah, that was down to the Long Covid headaches/brain fog . The crappy broadband is why I sometimes wail on the match thread that my picture has suddenly turned to slush, Sod's Law dictating that it happens when the action has moved to one or other penalty area.
Something to bare in mind is that Wi-fi speeds are not as reliable or as fast as Ethernet (cat 5/6 cable), Wi-fi 6 devices are just hitting the market now which gives a possible speed of 1gig. But even if your router is Wi-fi 6 enabled your devices wont be, the Wi-fi chip in my iPhone 11 is faster than the one in my two/three year old Macbook.
I have worked for a couple of ISP's over the years in tech support supporting ADSL etc, personally I am with TalkTalk (used to work for them), the router that they supplied needed rebooting every month as they are basic. They tend to run out of memory so I bought myself a better router and my problems went away, now I'm not expecting many people to spend nearly £300 on a router but that is exactly what I did.
Happy to offer advice.
Sounds like you are recommending upgrading the router that is supplied by the provider. Which one did you go for? Thanks.
There will be much better routers than the one your ISP supplies. A decent one is about the £100+ mark although if you are not having issues with the one they have supplied it is best to keep it due to ease/simplicity of of set up.
My old router dropped out a fair bit but the replacement (a newer model) my supplier has provided has fixed this issue.
Comments
And even with the ethernet cable just now, I get 51mbps
That's a big drop, isn't it?
@golfaddick funny enough I did ask him if he could give me a print-out and he said it had no way to do that. Trouble is, this outfit is owned by the country's richest oligarch. Even I know when I'm beaten :-)
Got these speeds outside the Valley at the end of October, 5G all lit up there
Faster line speed supports applications that do not yet exist or maybe permits dozens of devices in the home to download information at the same time.
But if you only want to watch the footie on the tele, its not much help.
Here we are plagued by regular drop-outs which I suspect are the fault of Open Reach as they affect everyone in the street. I'd happily trade 30 MB of speed for a reliable service.
The company will need to contribute though hopefully!
This can work in principle because data throttling due to congestion is only applied to a specific type of internet traffic because your ISP can't slow down all traffic. As a VPN encrypts that traffic, it makes it impossible for your ISP to see it. And it can't slow down what it can't see.
This would not work if the reason for slowdown is not ISP speed throttling. I haven't really been able to test this as my speed is usually ok for my usage.
and make sure you have the firmware up to date
Obviously that is more than enough for decent downloads, but what I stupidly didn't realise was just how important upload speed was, and that is often a very small fraction of the download speed.
Since moving to a place with 200mb/s, we haven't had any issues at all!
(JOKE!!!)
A quick look at the drop-down menu shows right now 7 other wifi networks my Mac can pick up.
That said, in my office, with internet provided by UPC, the cable operator, none of this shit happened. Occasionally it went down, but we'd call UPC and they'd admit that it was a general outage in the vicinity. But otherwise, rock solid and fast. And there we were in 6 storey old style apartment block, typical of the area. Here, it's detached houses all around and a lot of older people occupying them (the porn baron being an exception :-) )
I will certainly investigate channels using @Big_Bad_World webpage, although I now recall a techie looked at that not so long ago
I think the overall takeout, for which I am grateful is that if I can get at least 20mbps with VPN on, then any buffering on iPlayer is not the fault of the line speed, and increasing it is unlikely to solve the problem,
I'd always recommend to anyone to get the fibre option if offered, the reliability is far greater than having metal either aluminium or copper involved as we live in wet country and conducting metals don't mix well with water. And from a base level, fibre is easier amd quicker for engineers to fix than faults on the copper network.
Remember unless you are with Virgin or living in a full fibre city that has had the network provided by one of about a thousand alternate network providers such as gigaclear it is maintained by Openreach. If you speak to your service provider make sure they politely ask Openreach to have a look at their network performance data and proactively fix the problem even if that means closing the road outside of your house to do it
My old router dropped out a fair bit but the replacement (a newer model) my supplier has provided has fixed this issue.