DSL is pissin me off....

[CHl2IS]

Hey everyone, i have a problem with my dsl. while it says that i am connected at 1472000 bps, i download much slower.. i took a screen shot of it, sorry about discoloring. i called up bellsouth a couple of times and all they said was that they dont guarantee a minimum speed? before it was downloading at 100k which is good for me.... but that was months ago. i bought it in a year plan so i have to stick with it. its really pissin me off! i know we have some computer people in here.. can i get some help?

[ProjectMag]

How long have you had DSL service? What kind of area do you live in, a well populated one? If you've had the service for awhile, you may be experiencing slower transfer rates as DSL becomes more popular and more people in your area are getting it. The more people using it, the less bandwidth for each user.

[Hexis]

zzzt! Wrong. DSL != cable. Only an tardfairy telco would multiplex DSL to the point where you would see slow down due to local traffic.

A DSL line is only DSL between your house and the CO, from there on out it rides a much larger ATM network, which should be able to handle far more traffic than is ever genertated by normal use, or even heavy use.

For example I used to work for a nice large ISP in Minneapolis. They had _many_ Qwest dsl customers (my isp did the ISP side, Qwest did the line). We had about 1800 customers per ATM DS3 from Qwest's ATM network. on average each customer had 640kbit/s down / 272kbit/s up. 1800 * 640 = 1,152,000 kbit/s, now that's on a 45mbit or 45,000 kbit/s line. Now before you say "look! slow down if everyone uses it!" The line was never above 20mbit/s usage, with normal usage between 10mbit/s and 15mbit/s. And I do mean _never_. The economy of scale helps a lot when you get 1800 subscribers in one place.

Now, if you will think of your average CO. I'm guessing no more than 1800 customers in one CO, but even if there are more, no biggie. Most telcos (including Qwest) use OC3 or higher circuits for ATM backbone connectivity. An OC3 is 155mbit/s. Using my previous numbers that would provide perfect service to 12600 subscribers, with room to spare.

So... the moral of the story (with numbers) is:
Unless bell south is limiting you further than your natural line limit you are indeed seeing some sort of problem. It could be that your line's quality isn't quite high enough and you are not training up at your full subscribes speed. You could be DLing from a site that can not pump data to you as fast as your line can take it (which is prob the case).

On a 1,472,000mbit/s line your max DL speed (in kbyte/s) would be 184kbyte/s, lose a lil to overhead, and figure 170 would be a damn good speed. You should see 100 pretty often (again, only if where you are DLing from can spit the data out to you fast enough). Does your ISP have a ftp server near you that you can test with? That should be a pretty good test. Those "test your speed" sites are a joke. I have a 1mbit/s line at home, and they never come close. However if I download off my ISP's local ftp server I saturate the line in seconds.

Whew, long story.

[CHl2IS]

ok.... so does anyone know how i can fix it?

[CHl2IS]

ok.... so does anyone know how i can fix it? every site downloads at 5 kbps or slower... yet on kazaa or morpheus i download at a (whoopdy doo) 10 kbps or sometimes 20.. so if im payin 40 bux a month for a 56 k line.. thats just wrong and i paid for it for a years use so i cant stop it. please anyone know whats wrong? it used to be fine untill a couple of months ago.

[bsusigep18]

Speed issues...i work for ATT's cable modem internet service...and if you have speed problems, its usually something wrong with the lines, but thats att and att sucks a whole lot. as for not guarunteeing a min. speed. check your contract, if they do not guaruntee a minimum speed, go to your local chamber of commerce, it ain't called high speed access for nothin. i get probably 3 calls a week at work in which people get screwed and could easily sue out of it, there has to be something better that they can tell you. even if they don't guaruntee it, they should still help you, you're their friggin customer!