Orange installed my upto 8mb ADSL broadband - yay.

Activated a week ago, yet speed tests and normal browsing is betweel 512k & 1mb speeds.

At what point will I get nearer the 8mb, and is there anything I can do to help things along?

I always thought they increased your speed gradually day by day until it became unstable and the sever detected data loss, then throttled back to the last known good?

I'm not keen at being stuck with speeds slower than I had in the old place with ancient lines and 4 miles from exchange! New place is 3 years old, and less than 1/4 mile from the exchange.

Was expecting better

Plusnet upgraded my 2Mbit line to 8Mbit automagically, but speedtests were still showing 2Mbit speeds. Raised a problem with them and they then enabled something to make it 8Mbit. Might be worth raising a helpline thing with Orange to see if it's something they've forgotten to do...

Chris

Well I'll give them until sunday, which would be 10 days.

Then it's kick off time!

I got mine connected with Orange 2 months ago, straight in with 8.1mbit and it's still running like that now, i'd be having the conversation now

or, your line could be sh*te?

What type of contention ratio are you getting with the package?

Cant be as rubbish as the 30yr old line I had which could just about cope with 1mb!

Surely a 4 yr old line would be pretty good?

I'm doing speed tests half hourly. So far fastest is 2mb, but it seems to hover around 1.5mb..... :confused:

I had a brand new line installed back in the days of modems, would only connect at 14k, whereas the 40 year old line would connect at 50k all day long

I know it's different technology, but it's still entirely plausible (and possible) that they've ****** up the line.

Hopefully it isn't though!

BT can throttle the lines sometimes. Happened to me when I moved to 8Mb.

I was getting 1.5Mb tops. The ISP contacted BT and removed the cap. I get 4-6Mb now and I'm 300m form the exchange.

If BT is capping you they'll only respond to requests from the ISP.

ADSLmax can take about 10 days to settle I was told. I never noticed any of that myself just the above problem.

go here - speedtester.bt.com/

the speedtest might not be accurate , but more importantly it will give you what "profile" your isp has set for you. It might be ( as happened to me a few years ago when i switched to 8meg initialy ) stuck on 2meg.

My max connection was capped at 2mb unintentionally for the first couple of weeks. After a lot of discussion with my ISP we came to the conclusion that on certain trouble free lines the maximum stable line rate isn't set after 10 days. This is an easy fix fortunately, but has to be requested by the ISP. Mine changed over on the day Max went live though, and I gather that there have been a lot of tweaks to the service since then.

If you call Orange, just hope you don't get the moron of the shift like I seem to always get. They never seem to know what they are talking about and just do not listen to my problem. If they make out that its your fault for not using the master socket or using a router, just say you'll get someone local to come out and test it. Call back 5 minutes later and say that you're router is working fine in another house and another router on your line/another socket is working fine, so must be their problem.

I've not had any issues with Orange at all

when i lived across the road my 8mb connection only hit 5mb, now im across the road it now hits 7.5mb:rolleyes:

go here - speedtester.bt.com/

the speedtest might not be accurate , but more importantly it will give you what "profile" your isp has set for you. It might be ( as happened to me a few years ago when i switched to 8meg initialy ) stuck on 2meg.

This is what the test gave me:

Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.

IP profile for your line is - 7150 kbps

DSL connection rate: 448 kbps(UP-STREAM) 8128 kbps(DOWN-STREAM)

Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - 5416 kbps

If you wish to discuss these results please contact your ISP.

Been doing speed tests via Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test, and results are irratic. This morning did 3 and got over 7mb. in an evening most I've hit is 2.

I'll keep doing my 30min speedtest.net tests, and keep an eye on things after Sun/Mon.

sounds like you might have a rubbish contention :(

Anything I could do about that babs?

phone your ISP, and tell them about the large variation in service, and tell them you're not happy.

basically, you don't have the connection to yourself, so there might be as many as 50 people sharing one "up to 8mbit" connection

Seems to spike and drop, but lately the drops seem to be temporary.

Mostly seem to be getting 3-6 mid evenings, and 7/8 at other times.

I'm still testing every 30 min and will make a call in a week once I've got a load of info and trends to fire at them.

so it seems to be dipping at "peak" times then?

There are things you can do to improve speeds a little, you could fit a new face plate on the bt socket with a built in splitter(bt could slap your wrists though if they see it)

This would remove the ring wire from your adsl connection, the ring wire is the powered line for the ringer, it adds some distortion to the signal, by removing it your speed could increase slightly.

Dont connect a phone cable extention to the socket, instead connect your router as soon as possible and then have a longer ethernet cable running to your pc.

Wireless will slow you down, best to have wired.

There is a little program knocking around that allows you to alter your snr margin (Signal-to-noise ratio)

the higher the noise on the line the higher your snr, the higher your snr the lower your speed. You can lower your snr but the lower you go the more errors you'll get on the line, when it gets too low the connection will become unstable and keep dropping.

DMT (DSL-Modem Tool)

I think all thats right but please feel free to shoot me down(i'm not a pro)

what about TCP optimizer as well?!?!?

My orange was connected at 5.6 MB and has stayed the same since i installed it and not changed.

It was promoted as 8 MB though.