How to tweak Broadband

[sohailm6]

Can you lease point me in the right direction, I have Broadband access from NTL at 512K, also can you give speed test results for this service and the speed test site used.

Results from http://www.dslreports.com/stest?loc=2
Test running..........
** Speed 242(down)/120(up) kbps **
(At least 4 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logged result.
Finish.

Results from http://www.dslreports.com/stest?loc=1

Test running..........
** Speed 232(down)/57(up) kbps **
(At least 4 times faster than a 56k modem)
Logged result.
Finish.

as you can see the results don't look very good :(

Thanks

Sohailm6

[dicki]

try this place, has tweaks and speed tests specifically for ntl cable

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/cmtips.html

dicki

[sohailm6]

Cheers Dicki,
I just love the quick responces at NM :)

Sohailm6

[BigBen]

Hi sohailm6,
I do not find DSLreports always to be very accurate.....I have run the test when my system is working really well only to get a disappointing result and then try again an hour later and I can get 9 times a modem speed....It might have something to do with how many people are using the system at the same time etc.


Regards

[Mothdiver]

Hi sohailm6,

One thing to remeber with the vendors who supply DSL, they don't advise or like to talk about contention ratio's, if you have the standard offering of DSL, you will most likely be at 50 to 1, this usually means one 2 meg hub has 50 people are using it for internet access, if nobody is using their own DSL, you are maxed out at 512Kbits, but if you are using it then the bandwidth is shared between all fifty users, now most two meg systems ( E1 ) have 32 channels, 2 are used signalling, this leaves 30 channels each at 64Kbits, this translates as 1920Kbits available bandwidth for actual usage, taken a step further if all 50 users decide to stream at the same time, they will be lucky to get 38.4kbits each, fortunately data transfer is of a bursty nature and peoples time on line varies, this is what keeps most of the bandwidth freed up for anybody who comes on line ( or should ), I believe if you are getting constantly low throughput, go to you supplier and ask them to put you on a better ( lower usage ) contention group.

If you go for the business package you a contention ratio of 20 to 1 and most users are day users freeing up the night, but is considerably more expensive.

Hope this helps.

Mothdiver :xmad2:

[sohailm6]

Bigben

I know that the results are affected by load on the internet but I just wanted to be sure I actually did get a 512K connection, as I previously had ADSL from BT and that seemed faster. It would be nice if I got other users results so I could compare.

Mothdiver

I am familiar with contention ratios and as I understand home user ADSL it is 50:1 but what do NTL offer I have heard people mention 200:1, and how I'm I supposed to find out how many people have the Broadband service in my area.

The reason I actually started this topic was because I remember reading somewhere that Broadband was capped at 512K but it was possible to actually get more out of it by some tweaking. I have tried some tweaks and changed the RWin value but it has no effects of the speed test.

Anyway thanks for the input, I will have to stop worrying about thew speed and start online UT again

Sohailm6

[mackerel]

I'm not sure about this, but I believe that ntl cable modems are higher bandwidth, but they are limited to 512k nominal (actually 600k) per modem. It is not clear how fat the pipe is before then, or how many share it.

With ntl, to max out the connection I find downloading Solaris from Sun is a good way. 70 kbytes+ typically :D