Open Forum → Broadband speed and packet loss - what is the reality

HI folks
over here in the UK we have a problem of promised ISP speeds and actually received speeds.... can anyone lay out the 'ground rules' of 'perfect service' 'acceptable service' 'Poor service'; Packets lost, Speed received, Noise ratio, Line attenuation etc

As I live in a road of 10 homes, Close to each other and off the same cable duct, which has extremely variable broad band service with some four 'service providers' all working of one cable 'wholesaler' - responsible for equipment /cable maintenance, some users are getting below 1mb to unusable, while others up to 2.3mb (some times 2.6mb) while the claimed from the wholesaler is 3.3mb (2.06km from the exchange on copper wire) (not withstanding end user computer equipment)

The whole system appears a 'mess' and clearly in the UK the 'speed problem' answer is 'dependent on which provider' as to the actual problem or cause

any help or assistance from a neutral over 'the pond' would be appreciated.

Welcome to BBR.

As far as I know there are not official standards for what you are asking. On this side of the pond residential service is marketed as best effort.

It is possible to calculate perfect service if you know the speed you are connected to the ISP network. If you know that you can factor in various types of overhead to arrive at best case speed.

From your description it sounds like you have DSL service. DSL speed is distance limited and a function of the characteristics of the copper pair used. If speed for a given household is always low most likely due to limitation of the physical circuit. The only way to know for sure is to check modem stats to see if modem/DSLAM are able to sync at the correct speed.

If speed varies wildly by time of day most likely cause is network congestion. Try doing a traceroute (tracert in Windows) to stable sites in good times and bad. Latency should gradually increase with distance and hop count. Sudden unexplained increase probably means that link or the previous link is congested.

If you want to calculate best case speed here is how to do it.
»www.tschmidt.com/writing ··· 86519437

/tom

From what you describe it could be wire length, quality of service not being enforced, and/or too many people sharing the connection to maintain full speed when everyone is using it.

Way back when before napster first came out my connection was very nice, after that it seems half the people on my circuit were acting like a server 24/7, and the isp didn't allocate enough bandwidth to us so my connection was slower, along with I had packet loss, especially during the evening hours when people got home from work. They made no attempt to fix it, and the old 53k dial-up was more reliable so I just told them where to stick it as I had an alternative. Traces from remote sites to my ip showed that all of the packet loss occurred at the last hops which is a clear sign of over subscription.

In your case you may not have an alternative, and you need everyone with a issue in your area complaining about this otherwise they will keep blaming your computer. You may need to have them move some of you to a different circuit if they aren't all already at capacity.