Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Where'd our connection speed go to?

We use a BT backbone for our broadband connection though we go through a different gateway. Yesterday DaBoss started complaining about the speed. It wasn't with just one site, the computer wasn't running anything or sucking down updates and most importantly mine was having the same result.

I disconnected and reconnected the router, I rebooted the router. Then rang our gateway provider who got onto the backbone who came back with a shrug. In the meantime I ran the official speedtest from BT that's speedtester.bt.com and our 6Mb connection link was returning 300Kb. Bad point you can only run it once every three hours.

"So you're getting 3000"
"No three hundred"
"Oo that's bad"

Tests were run with no conclusion. Apparently BT won't start looking for problems until the get a lot of complaints and will barely admit to anything.

This morning I ran the same test - 4500Kb.

"Seems to be fixed, but that's a big difference"
"Yeah can't put that down to fluctuation, they might have fixed something last night. All the residentals coming on line and complaining"

Ah the joys of large companies - one person complains and nothing, but lots of people complain and suddenly something is done.

2 comments:

Orphi said...

What, no SLA?

I must admit, the one time I've had to ring up about a home broadband problem, I had to wait about 8 minutes for somebody to pick up the phone. (Remember that God-awful “sombody answer the phone” song that went round a few years ago?) However, the one time I rang about the broadband connection at work, the phone rang once and I was speaking to a human.

Of course, answering the phone is one thing, fixing the problem is another entirely…

FlipC said...

For something this size it would be prohibitive, that said other than when they switched DNS servers without telling us it's not been a problem. I'm also generally put through to a back-room tech rather than a parrot when I need to check something.