Weird Internet Speed Problem

Hi all

Would appreciate some advice.

Up to Dec last year, had 2MB Tiscali Broadband.Recently upgraded to " up to 8MB" Line has been activated and the two small 'monitor' icons in the system tray (when I hover the mouse button over the icon) show between 5.6 and 6MB.I have a SAGEM modem.
The problem is that a have ran numerous speed test and results give anywhere between 0.5 and 1MB !!
Contacted Tiscali who advised the problem may lie with the computer..asked me to 'optomise'....basically clean out temp files etc (which I do regularly with CrapCleaner).Tiscali also advised to shut down Zonealarm while running the test....did this...same result....shut down all my other apps (Boclean. KAV7, PrevX2, Cookiewall)...same result.
Tiscali then advise I contact the computer supplier with the proble....basically saying that I am receiving the correct speed and it apperas the computer is the problem.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Terry

 

Know anyone with a laptop who can pop by and connect to see if they get better speed, this would likely rule out computer prob. Personally I suspect your provider is yanking your chain. The "Oh it must be your computer sir" trick is always worth a try.

 

Could it be a case of getting your "bits" and "bytes" mixed up?

 

Put out a few feeler's Terry, lot's of tiscali speak around the web.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=722551

The scream appear's to contain several useful tiscali stickies.

http://www.the-scream.co.uk/forums/f8.html


GF

 

Thanks for all your replies folks....will heed your advice and comments....need to do some more investigations methinks.The laptop from a friend looks promising. I'll be back !!

Cheers

Terry

 

Terry,

Could you download this 20 MB file. How long does it take? It's the speed test file for my ISP.

https://storage.bigpond.com/public/bin/OnlineStorage.exe

At 8 Mbps it should take around 20 seconds.

 

Before you go-do this test to check that your connection is optimised

TEST.

 

Brian,

I think 20 secs is a bit optimistic where 8 mbps is the max speed and the actual achievable speed may be 6 mbps if he is lucky

 

Hairy Coo,

Only a little optimistic. I'm on BigPond 8 Mbps and it just took me 24 seconds. I'm sure I've had around 20 seconds in the past. But you are correct. 8 Mbps is the maximum.

 

Well just to throw my two cents in also. I am on Cableone at 3mb and it took me 23 seconds to grab this file.

 

bigc

wow-you are unpingable!Good connection

 

bigc73542,

Did you download the 20 MB file in 23 seconds?

Strange. Your transfer rate is 44 kb/sec. Mine is 790 kb/sec.

 

Hairy Coo,

I must have been dreaming. I shouldn't get 20 seconds.

 

Seems a reasonable time for you-my actual speed is also around 8mbps and it did take 21 seconds approx.

 

When I first got 8 Mbps from BigPond I could only get 4 Mbps. I had one of the original Alcatel modems which I later found only supported the slower speed. I bought a Linksys modem/router and my speed doubled.

For those who are confused, 8 Mbps= 8000 Kbps= 1000 KBytes/sec. But with overhead, 800 KBytes/sec is more realistic.

 

i use tiscali too, they are total clueless morons!!! last year one of their forum support people wrote a huge post saying how all the customers normally didn't understand networks. that would have been OK, but, at the same time their DNS had completely stopped working. i wrote a howto showing how to fix it and the forum mods hid my posts from anyone who isn't logged in to the forum, and you can only login if you have a tiscali email address

their MO is to point in every direction saying that's where the problem is forgetting to point to themselves