Should I be suspicious about my broadband? - Blogs

So this morning I got up and attempted to fire up my mail client and it just hung while downloading. Next a browser got fired up and an attempt to do a simple Google search failed. On looking at the BT HomeHub's status, it was reporting it was connected but at a shocking 4,224 Kbps, although clearly it wasn't. So I did what every good techie does in this situation. I switched it off and back on again. This seems to have done the trick, but has left me with a worrying paranoia.

Why am I shocked at a downstream of 4,224 Kbps? I think I should explain for those that don't know me.

 

The Background

Several years ago I was with the ISP Daisy, although I was far happier with Griffin Internet before Daisy bought out the home customer accounts. I had been for years (since a week after my exchange was enabled - 23/07/2003) and had been very please with my 512Kb, then the 1Mb connection. I saw little point in upgrading to the max service as realistically could only get 2.5Mb and such a low speed increase did not justify the price increase. However, I was swayed when I was told that I could move onto the Max service at a marginal price increase. For a couple of months I was happy, I was even getting 4Mb downloads. This all ended with a crackle on my phone line during a storm and me a couple years of hell. To cut a long story short, I would get a phone call and the router would stop sync'ing and when it came back, the downstream would be 3Mb+ but my IP Profile will have dropped to 256Kbps or lower and I would be stuck like that for 3days. I ended up moving my broadband over to BT to deal with 1 company, rather than playing the ISP blame game aka ISP ping-pong. This happened pretty much once a week on average. I gave up with ringing BT's customer support lines as they were a waste of space and turned to the BTCare Community Forums. The moderators are fantastic and dealt we me via email (so no wasting time on hold), and over a series of multiple threads (listed below), we may not have got my line problems solved, we did source a solution. I returned to a fixed rate broadband of 2Mb. This meant when the line crackled, I lost connection, but it would come straight back at 2Mb as IP Profiles don't apply to fixed rate connections.

 

The Present

You may now understand why being back on, what would appear to be, the Max service worries me. I guess I should just enjoy the doubled internet speed, but if I see a return to the old issues I'm going to be straight back on to the forums and start shouting. After all, can they really change you account without asking you?

No doubt I will be posting updates. I may even start publishing the scripts I wrote through out this period. I've not published them so far, as just as I was getting to the point of doing so, we resolved the issue.

 

BTCare Community Threads

1. 1. At a loss with phone line
   2. At a loss with phone line and broadband
   3. Has my old issue come back or am I paranoid

 

Current Router Status - 20/08/2012

Line state	Connected
Connection time	0 days, 01:03:16
Downstream	4,224 Kbps
Upstream	448 Kbps