I have been with the same service provider for 8 years,
starting from the plain old ADSL to the current ADSL2+

Lately the connection speed seems to slow down..
to the point that at lowest resolution (240p) a youtube movie took a long time to came through!!
The troughput speed is less than 500kbps!!
This is very upsetting since ADSL2+ should have speed of 4 Mbps or more
at the lowest speed furthest away from the DSLAM point..

Well, this morning a friend of mine ask me to help to setup his new modem.
So I hooked up the darn thing to my ADSL2 line and...
WOWZAH!! I got 8 Mbps all of a sudden!!!

It seems that my old Netcomm NB5 is getting old indeed..
It is now time to change and buy a new one..

gelandangan we have had dialup for a few years and it was real cheap so I was reluctant to change,we got broadband and it wasnt much faster till we changed our internet security,now its pretty good. (makes me think we should have changed that and kept cheap dialup)

Hey Gelan...so what you are saying is that the electronic gizmos can actually wear out and cause a "slow" connection. Would this be caused by maybe dry solder joints or bad connections inside, or does the silicon chip actually erode away or wear out?

Cheers, Vince

maybe its programming is out of date and can't keep up with the new protocols. Ask to borrow your friends modem or take yours over to his house and see if his slows down. You should have enough combinations to figure out where the bottle neck is.

gelan

What Sim says is true, take your modem to his house and hook it up with his computer, if speeds improve, it's your pc. If they do not improve, then you can get driver updates from netcomm's web site. Even thou the equipment is older, for some reason I suspect a problem with your pc. Is your operating system updated to the most recent updates? If so I would check any security program (Norton before 2009 was a killer) and temporarily disable your security and firewall and see if that improves the speed.

I do not think it is the fact that the old modem deteriorated,
I think it is that the newer modem has higher sensitivity and better noise rejection than the older model.

Nevertheless, I did tried the swap on the modem at my mate's house.
Yep, same result!

No matter what router I use, the best speed I see is just under 1.5Mbps.
Sucks to be 5.5km from the exchange.

on dialup here in NZ we were getting 40 -53 kbs which we were told was real fast for dialup.

How do you monitor the speed ???

Lately I've noticed downloads take longer and videos start and stop.
I'm supposed to have a high speed cable set up that's wired direct via modem.

on dialup it would show when you put mouse down on conection logo in bottom right corner of screen. now we have broadband so dont know any more.

chambered

if you run windows, you can use this from microsoft.

Network Monitor

Thanks !!! From what I read it sucks up a lot of memory...........I'm only running 2G on Vista so that concerns me !!!


geland, thanks for bringing this topic up, I've been wanting to increase my knowledge base in this area. I just don't know where to go. Every time I talk about the subject it turns geek speak and I can't follow because I don't understand the terminology !!!

If anyone knows a good reference sight please give a link.

chambered

Here is another one that uses a small memory footprint and it runs in the task bar by your clock and its free.

Netspeed Monitor

McAfee, the anti-virus folks have this internet connection speed checker that I've been using. I get over 2MBPS.

us.mcafee.com/root/spe...?cid=45700

We used to have cable, (terrible) then the city said they will soon offer fibre. we have FOTH which is fibre to the home and all 3 services (internet, tv,phone) all thru the fibre optic. The best part is it's $90 a month for all of it except tier 3 packages. The speed is 100MB per sec, not kb per sec, for example the wife wanted to buy a movie (about last night) with Demi Moore and we bought it and burned it to dvd. The time it took to download the movie was 45 seconds <------ yup seconds.