What internet speeds should I expect

[Arron]

We live in Epping (the Sydney one) and I'm looking at getting a new Internet Service Provider. Currently, we get an astoundingly slow service for DSL2 - like 2.4mps download speed. It used to be about 6.7mps but has got steadily worse over the last few years. I don't want to make a move to a new provider unless I'm confident they can provide a good service - cos I don't want to be locked into another dud for a year or two.

So is there anyone else here serviced by the Epping exchange who can tell me what service they have and what speeds they get?

I'm interested especially in the Epping exchange because I know that if I ring the provider they will say 'the problem is the epping exchange - its congested - nothing we can do about it etc etc'.

If not the Epping exchange, then anywhere in the NW suburbs would be good to know about.

FWIW, the NBN looks like being a distant dream around here.

Measurements taken using a OCKLA speedtest ap on an Ipad Air (I don't think that matters, but just in case).

cheers
Arron

[doug3030]

We live in Epping (the Sydney one) and I'm looking at getting a new Internet Service Provider.

If you are on an ADSL service it is almost 99.9% certain that the infrastructure there is owned by Telstra. Other providors own very small enclaves of the copper network. Most of it is Telstra's.

No matter who you choose for your service provider the infrastructure being used to provide the service is still the same Telstra network. The other Internet Service providers wholesale lines from Telstra and retail then to their customers. It does not matter who you are paying for your services the same piece of copper wire will be carrying the data.

There are still many areas where exchanges are overcrowded. The copper network was never designed for internet, Most of it was built well before ADSL was even thought of. The ADSL equipment takes up a lot of room in an exchange that was not built to hold it.

Telstra is reluctant to spend money on its copper network now as once an area goes NBN the network is owned by NBN Co so Telstra sees no value for money in upgrading networks that will be taken off them in the next few years.

I know that it is not good news for people in your circumstances Arron, but that is the reality of the commercial world of the Telco's. The only consolation I can offer is that you are not suffering alone. Many people are in your situation.

Cheers

Doug

[Master Splinter]

There's a heatmap here - http://www.adsl2exchanges.com.au/viewexchange.php?Exchange=EPPI - showing speeds that people are reporting in that area, as well as an overview of some alternative service providers. Also try on the Whirlpool Broadband forums, as they'll be able to point you to sites for more detailed line testing (ie signal to noise ratio) that could shed more light on your problem.

According to that site, the exchange is not full, and Internode, TPG, Optus, EFTel and Telstra all have equipment in the exchange there. Just be glad you're not behind a RIM, as you'd never see anything over half dialup speed (22.5kbps)!

[Chris Parks]

I have ADSL2 and if I could get 2.4 I would be doing handstands and telling the world.

[doug3030]

I have ADSL2 and if I could get 2.4 I would be doing handstands and telling the world.

Here' my speed - http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4844090650

Should I be doing cartwheels? Sometimes I get even a bit faster than this. :2tsup:

Cheers

Doug's a slightly faster one http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4844102985

[Yanis]

Arron,
You actual connect speed can be read off your modem. Login and look at your status page and that gives the actual speed at which your modem connects. You real word speed is affected by a number of things. Your upper limit is your ADSL connect speed, then there is the network between your exchange and the ISP's routers, then the speed between there and your site of interest.

Your modem's connect speed is impacted by three basic factors, how far you are from the exchange, the quality of any joints you have between you and the exchange and how many other people are on the cable between you and the exchange that are also using ADSL. Your connect speed may have dropped due to corrosion in the connections but there may also be more people using the cable which will impact your speed. As doug said the copper cable was only ever meant for voice and ADSL was an afterthought so the more ADSL services on a copper multi pair cable the slower the overall speed is for everyone on that cable.

So the bottom line is if your modem's connect speed is 2.4 mb then that is all you will get regardless of the provider since all they will do is connect your copper line to their equipment.

BTW, my connect speed is 20mb which is insanely high for ADSL. There are two reasons for this. One is that everybody else is on NBN, so there are only three other people on my cable using ADSL (we are all outside of the NBN coverage - don't get me started) and we are only a few hundred meters from a RIM outfitted with ADSL equipment connected back to the exchange with fiber.

[Chris Parks]

The problem we have is the limited connectivity to the rest of the world from an isolated town. I am sure every small town has similar issues, infrastructure never meant to support high data loads.

[Fuzzie]

I'm on the Gold Coast and around here my ADSL2+ connect speed at the moment is 1.2 kbit/s. You don't have to be in an isolated town to bask in bad performance.

[doug3030]

Just so that you can all see that I do not have the luxury of 100+ speeds all the time here's what I get in the afternoons when everyone else is online:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4844641220

But I guess that a lot of you would be happy to get 18 mb/sec anyway

Cheers

Doug

[Thylacene]

Have you tried getting Telstra to check the copper by lodging a fault with them, if you were getting better before you should. I had to argue with them for a bit to have it done, as they reckoned my line was not suitable for ADSL let alone ADSL2. After much pushing it went from 700K to just under 4Mb, turns out the fault was in a junction box 50m from the house.

I am 4.5km cable distance from the exchange and this is my result http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4845305807 which is sad, NBN not planned until 2017 and I intend to sell up and retire in early 2018.

Doug, I am jealous, would love 18Mb

[q9]

It is possible that a move to a different provider will help - I always liked internode, and they traditionally had no minimum terms, so if they were no good you could change. I never had to. They also had the best tech support - if you clearly know what you are doing, they don't run you through the "clueless idiot" script. Sometimes a change in adsl modem will change things too, but not so often. Your's ever been restarted?

Quite slow here tonight http://www.speedtest.net/result/4845340486.png (http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4845340486)

[Arron]

Q9, that's In Japan is it ?


And yes, rebooted frequently.

Arron

[doug3030]

I am 4.5km cable distance from the exchange and this is my result http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4845305807 which is sad, NBN not planned until 2017 and I intend to sell up and retire in early 2018.

Doug, I am jealous, would love 18Mb

4.5 km is about the limit of cable distance for ADSL to work at any usable speed so that's a pretty good result under the circumstances.

The technology has been around for a long time to allow higher data speeds through shorter copper pairs, which is why the government got it so wrong by doing the NBN rollout as fibre to the premises. If they did it nationwide as fibre to the node we could all be on 100mb/sec now. Then with everyone on reasonable speeds, they could have slowly converted the fire to the node to fibre to the premises to allow for an increase in speed later. It would have been much cheaper and quicker to get everyone onto good speeds.

ANyway my internet is a bit quicker this evening than it was yesterday http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4847659747

78mb/sec instead of 18. not that you would notice for most usage anyway.

Cheers

Doug

[q9]

Q9, that's In Japan is it ?

Yes it certainly is.



And yes, rebooted frequently.


Ok, then probably not likely to be anything related to it running for a long time. What brand is it? In my experience D-Link was about the worst, Billion were much better and recommended to me by internode. Linksys were also good, but I did have the odd one with dodgy firmware that needed upgrading before it settled down and played nicely. Unless there is a major fault with the hardware, you are unlikely to be losing a lot of speed, but nevertheless worth checking out if you can.

Related story, I once ran a setup where my internet connection was controlled by an old pc I was running smoothwall on. Long story short, I ended up with terrible conncection speeds, barely cracking 1Mb/s - turned out the motherboard in the firewall pc had dodgy capacitors (remember that one?) causing all kinds of havoc. Replaced with a modern mobo + cpu and I gained about 5Mb/s. Improved everything out of sight.

[Arron]

Well I made the decision to go with one of the big-name carriers. ADSL2 and pay-as-you-go home phone package. Installation was last week, which went smoothly and speeds immediately jumped from the 2.4mbs at which it had resolutely stayed for the last few years to 4.7mbs. This did involve a new wifi router - so not sure how much of the speed increase was attributable to the new router. The 'old' router was a reasonably new Linksys one, but the package included a pre-configured router so in it went.

But the phone didn't work.

So we got tech support looking at that. Today they got it going, and internet speeds have jumped up to 9.8mbs.

Happy me.

cheers
Arron

[rrich]

Speed, it's always speed.

When I started accessing a computer through the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) I was able to achieve the blinding speed of 110. That is 110 bits per second or 10 teletype characters per second.

Then, OMG I was able to increase my speed by 50%! I used an IBM Selectric with a 150 bits per second modem through the PTSN.

Here, most or our Internet access is through the cable TV company. There is a huge controversy over something called "Net Neutrality". But that's another story. Generally speaking, it doesn't matter where you go for internet access, library, college, high school, café or a smart 4G-LTE phone, the speed is the speed that you get.

Yeah they try to sell higher speeds but I've never noticed a difference.

A lot of slowness is attributed to configurations. Generally speaking, the networks that use Dynamic Host Configuration Program (DHCP) for the router and your computer with a dynamic Domain Name Server (DNS) spend about 5 seconds when you first power up getting their IP address, etc. After that the connection is rather good. Don't get confused by the word "Host". Virtually everything connected to an IP network is considered a host.

[rwbuild]

We have wireless prepaid, 4G, no prob, line of sight to tower about 800m

[doug3030]

Yeah they try to sell higher speeds but I've never noticed a difference.

In Australia at least, the speed you pay for is not guaranteed, the carriers will sell ADSL2+ as "up to 20mb/sec" but because of your location you might only get 1mb/sec, maybe less. But at another location closer to the exchange 20mb/sec may well be available, so its a bit of a lottery.

The other aspect of the "speed equation" is that the speed you get from your service providor is not the only factor governing what speed you download at. There may be many links between you and the server you are downloading from. 20 or more links is not uncommon. No matter what speed you are paying for, you will not get the data at anything more than the slowest link that it has to pass through, probably in some foreign country and totally beyond the control of your service providor.

Cheers

Doug

[Evanism]

Dont neglect the socket!

Especially in Sydney.

I just fixed up a connection that was ratty and slow. Traced back all the wires, redid them using telegraph tieoff technique and pulled apart the old socket and rewired it all properly. Speed jumped to 100% and is 100% stable.

366458

For the socket, if its the old style, strip back to new wire and wrap it at least once around the post. If it's newer punch-style, take them out and repunch down. I'm not saying the originals workmanship are dodgy/nasty, but they were done in the stone ages. I lived in Mosman and Neutral Bay and in every house the wiring was absolutely RS.

[Arron]

I have had a look at the wiring under our house. It's ancient and looks like it's been hacked around by previous owners. It's pretty simple - just comes in to the roof, then splits somewhere into two wires going into two basic telephone sockets. One in the study and one in the dining room. There were a couple of other telephone outlets but now abandoned due to most calls coming to the mobiles.

We just have adsl and regular telephone service going down it.

I should probably renew the accessible stuff - just pre-emptively.

Any other advice ? What sort of wire and sockets should I use?

[alexm1]

Arron, approach it logically.
First disconnect the lines you are no longer using, take them out of the circuit altogether, then check your speed again.
Next re join all the joints as evanism has outlined above, check the speed again.
Finally, if none of this has improved things then replace the wire, just buy some telephone cable, it will be fine. Reform the plates in the sockets to ensure a firm connection.
Be aware that the problem could be outside your home and you may not get any improvement. I had problems some years back and had rewired all the points in the house with no improvement. The tech that came from Telstra advised that the cable running to the house was pre WW 2, ( that is world war 2!). He put in a request to replace it but the nbn beat them to it, we were fortunate to get fiber to the house so good speeds now.

[rrich]

Arron brought up something very important.

With ADSL or DSL you want to daisy chain all your phones and computer in a continuous chain. If you have the appropriate filter/electronics as provided by your Telco, then put the computer first in the chain. If Telco is not providing the filter/electronics, make the computer the last thing in the chain. Stray capacitance will degrade the electrical signalling.

The ADSL or DSL circuit is distance sensitive. The wire distance to your Telco central office (local exchange or local switch) will determine your speed. I don't know how smart your local Telco is, but if you can, order a second line for your ADSL or DSL. With nothing else on the Telco pair you'll get better performance.

[q9]

I actually forgot the most important thing I did for improving my ADSL connection - I installed a central splitter - one port just for the modem, the the phones fed of the other one. Made a fairly significant difference. Note, a splitter is not the same as those filters....

[rrich]

I actually forgot the most important thing I did for improving my ADSL connection - I installed a central splitter - one port just for the modem, the the phones fed of the other one. Made a fairly significant difference. Note, a splitter is not the same as those filters....

We call them filters here.

But YES!

Remember that one of the advantages (disadvantage too) of ADSL or DSL is that the length of the wire used to connect your home to the Telco Central Office greatly affects the speed possible. ASDL and DSL automatically adjust speeds based upon wire length. It's the physics involved. IIRC any wire length longer than 15,000 feet, 3 miles or about 5 Km is impractical for ADSL or DSL. (I've been retired 13 years and ADSL or DSL fell out of favor about 6 or 7 years earlier than that. Trying to remember all of this poop is difficult at times.)

There is one other thing. I don't know if your Telco uses a "Slick". Think of it as a multiplexor where there might be up to 30 or so phone lines coming into one side and two pair going out to the Central Office. (The slick fell out of favor at least 20 years ago but their ghosts still remain.) It works great for voice phone calls which are about 80% silence. When someone uses a dial up modem or fax (100% sound) the capacity of the two pair out drops significantly. I've been told that ADSL or DSL doesn't work for data through a slick. Assuming that there are pairs from the slick to the Central Office, your Telco may be able to bypass or wire around the slick.

[Arron]

Well I crawled around underneath our house and updated some of the really old and dodgy looking wiring. The result is an increase from a consistent 9 mbs to a consistent 12 mbs. Judging by the speeds told to me by several neighbours who use the same carrier that's a bit more then what they get, so I'm satisfied.

FWIW, the jump from 9 to 12 came from one thing only - disconnecting a spare outlet in the rumpus room. Disconnect, and the speed jumped. Reconnect, and down it went again. It can stay disconnected as we don't have much need for a landline any more.

cheers, and thanks for the advice.
Arron

[ian]

There is one other thing. I don't know if your Telco uses a "Slick". Think of it as a multiplexor where there might be up to 30 or so phone lines coming into one side and two pair going out to the Central Office. (The slick fell out of favor at least 20 years ago but their ghosts still remain.) It works great for voice phone calls which are about 80% silence. When someone uses a dial up modem or fax (100% sound) the capacity of the two pair out drops significantly. I've been told that ADSL or DSL doesn't work for data through a slick. Assuming that there are pairs from the slick to the Central Office, your Telco may be able to bypass or wire around the slick.IIRC big chunks of Australian suburbia were wired with this technology. It was called "pair gain"

[rrich]

Ian,
Yes, I do recall the term "Pair Gain".

[doug3030]

Ian,
Yes, I do recall the term "Pair Gain".

However there are a number of different wiring configurations that come under the "Pair Gain" banner.

Some pair gain systems will allow ADSL, but most will not.

I am not sure but I think that ADSL2 will not play on pair gains.

The pair gains systems that allow ADSL are usually the less intensive ones such as running just two houses off of one twisted pair. The "slicks" would definitely be a kiss of death to ADSL.

Cheers

Doug

[rrich]

Interestingly, today, it was in the shuttle from car dealer to home. It was a long ride and the passenger next to me was using a Wi-Fi hot spot. His 4G LTE phone was connected to the hot spot and providing Internet access. He said that it cost about $70 per month for unlimited data.