Fighting Demon & BT
This is the start of what will probably turn out to be a lengthy story. On Saturday I returned home from university to find that my parents had bought a new phone. Also the internet was painfully slow.
Various speedtest sites, as well as the Kent University Mirror Service, all peaked at 17KB/s throughput - putting our line speed at around 160Kbit.
Close examination revealed that a few weeks ago my parents had plugged the router into the ADSL port in one microfilter and then plugged this microfilter into the phone port of a second microfilter. So in theory the router should not be able to make a connection. But it had adapted, and miraculously held a slow connection.
Above: How I found our router. (DO NOT CONNECT YOUR ROUTER LIKE THIS)
After removing the offending second microfilter, I noticed that the speed had not increased. I tried swapping microfilters and even trying the Speedtocuh modem, but to no avail.
Also, whenever the router was plugged in without its second (wrong) microfilter, it made faint dialling noises on the line while negotiating a connection, then a constant white-noise buzz was on the line from there onwards whilst the router was connected.
Being overly optimistic, I gave it until Monday morning to fix, with frequent short bursts of activity using every last bit of bandwidth, as well as several router reboots, but alas it did not change the line speed and 300+ ms ping.
On Monday morning, just after 9am dad rang BT on 150. Their lines were busy, so he selected an option whereby BT promised to ring back within 1 hour. By 11.35 they had still not rung back, so I gave them a call.
As expected, the BT employee told me I must contact my ISP, even about the noise on the line. So I dialled Demons 0871 national rate number which is outsourced to a place like India.
Just like a previous call to Demon, Demon's employee followed a basic script of:
"Is it plugged in? ... What version of Windows do you have?..." etc. Eventually she directed me to a BT speedchecker website which I must use then email the results to helpdesk@demon.net, and that for the noise I must contact BT (even though ADSL connections cause it)
I begrudge paying national rate to speak to someone following a script, on top of my £19.99 a month package. Anyway, I went on the website, which appeared to have crashed but actually was doing the test, which took ages. It reported
Test1 comprises of Best Effort Test: -provides background information.
IP profile for your line is - *135 kbps*
DSL connection rate: *448 kbps*(UP-STREAM) *2848 kbps*(DOWN-STREAM)
Actual IP throughput achieved during the test was - *117 kbps*
Aha! Our IP Profile has been reduced to 135Kbps. BT Wholesale can reset this, probably meaning we have to have the 10 day auto-negotiation again.
The next times I tried the BT Speedtester, it told me it was busy and I should go away, so I bundled that result with a lengthy explanation of the problem to helpdesk@demon.net. Hopefully they will notice that all we really need is our IP Profile resetting. They'd better do it fast, as the net is awful and so is the buzzing on the line
comments
I have had the same symptoms (but not the same use of microfilters) but my line veers wildly between 39kbs and 2 meg. Demon knkow the problem lies with BT as it is my RAS profile that keeps dropping ofr no reason and stayign there for three days. I have had 2 BT engineers out but they keep arriving and tellimg me they've not been told anythign about internet and are there to fix my lack of dial tone.
Demon are hopping mad but BT keep screwing up. They really are useless. The first engineer even offered to give me some pirated anti virus software! Beggars belief really.