Our internet speeds are a joke And this sort of fits with what I've been seeing real world. We're with Freedom2Surf, 2 megabit unlimited, and most of the evenings its unusably slow. Anyone got any ideas on why this might be, or more importantly if there's anythign that could be wrong at our end? 6 comps on the network, 5 wireless, no spyware, noone else downloading.
I did my homework before we started with them, and they certainly weren't the cheapest. They apparetly don't use port blocking or any of the rest of it, and for the first few months they were fine. But 6 people trying to use the current connection is laughable. Do I have any recourse to money back, seeing as I'm paying for a service that they're not providing?
The further you get away from the exchange point the worse the connection is.. that might be a problemm..
Unless they gave you a SLA (service level agreement) which I'd be amazed if they did you will find it very hard to get out of your contract with them based on slow connection. I'd raise the problem with them, they should be able to see what might be slowing you down. I did a quick search around on isp review and can find almost no info on your ISP which worries me a bit. Do you know anyone else at all that uses them? How do they find the service? Are you sure nobody else is downloading in your house? I'd turn all the pcs off but one (make sure that one is virus/spyware clean) then re-run your speed test.
Freedom2Surf are on ADSLguide if you want more information, their website is http://www.freedom2surf.net/ - they won awards from PCPro, PC Advisor etc... Like I said, for about 3 months they were fine. I'll do what you suggested about the test to confirm I didn't really expect legal recourse or anything, but it does seem strange that they can charge you for a 2 megabit connection and then provide this.
With ADSL you're likely to suffer from slower speeds at peak time when everyone is on the net. Think of it like rush hour on the M25, you're not going very far very fast
FTS are one of the better ISP's. I would recomend only linking one pc to your master (phone) socket and testing to see if there is a difference and if there is youll know its yer lan causing the problem.
Send an email to F2S and they'll sort it out, they're quick to respond. I've used them for years and sing their praises, great service.
If your're sharing it with 6 people. I don't mean to sound patronising but have you checked someone hasn't got a p2p app running or something with is maxing the upstream as thats directly going to affect the downstream. Have you run a test with only you plugged to the router and disabled all the other connections?
The easiest way to find out if someone is p2ping it on the network is to download a copy of knoppix-std (Security Tools Distribution). If you have an existing linux box on this network just download etherape. Burn the image to disk and shove it into one of the CD-ROM drives of a machine connected to this network. Fire the machine up (assuming it boots from CD) and it should load up linux. Right click anywhere on the desktop when it appears and click on etherape (under network tools). Load up etherape (which will provide you with a graphical view of the communication taking place on your network). Each PC will be represented by a dot with lines stretching between them indicating which PCs are talking to each other (inside or outside the network, it'll show both). Thin lines are small packets/minimal communication, big fuckoff lines thicker than bungle's arm between machines indicate someone is whoring the bandwidth.
its worth it in the end, the cd has a lot of useful stuff on just don't go testing nessus or netcat on your network
