Anyone on 20mb in Newbury/Reading area?

Shad0r · 29-08-2007, 08:16

Hello all, long time reader, first time poster

Our house was upgraded to the 20mb service yesterday and the modem (the little blue NTL unit, 250 I think) reports the correct configuration information. Last night I just assumed we were being throttled as the best I could get was 4-5mbps, but this morning the best I can get is around 5.5mbps, checked using the forum speed test as well as various others.

The modem is hooked up to a Netgear Prosafe VPN router and working fine. Following advice from others, I switched it to 100mbps/full-duplex rather than auto, and did the same for the the network card on this PC (though our switch was already reporting a 1gbps link). This hasn't made any difference though.

So before calling Virgin I'm just wondering what kind of speeds other people in the Newbury/Reading area get from their 20mb package.

Cheers!

..Simon

Honeymonster · 29-08-2007, 13:02

I think you will find the bottleneck is your router.

Look here:-

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/compo...rt/Itemid,189/

I had the same issue. I upgraded to 20 meg and was only getting 7 meg. I had an old Netgear RP614 router. I upgraded to a newer, faster model and now I get the full 20 meg, and I'm in Reading (RG6).

Shad0r · 29-08-2007, 13:14

Interesting stuff, although our FVS338 is not listed. However, I will try connecting the modem directly to a laptop later and see if there's any difference. It would be a pain to replace the router seeing as it wasn't exactly a cheap model and has been superb over the last ~2 years of use (particularly with recent firmware releases).

Thanks for your help

Shad0r · 29-08-2007, 18:22

Well your suggestion lead me to a post in the Netgear support forum for their wired VPN units, discussing the problems with the latest firmware for the FVS338 (which I'd been using fine for a few months). It turns out that there's a bug in the 2.1.2-7 release that limits WAN throughput to 5-6mbps!

Just downgraded to 2.1.0-7 and am now seeing 10-15mbps from the various different tests, which is much more like it

ukcobra · 30-08-2007, 11:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Honeymonster

I think you will find the bottleneck is your router.

Look here:-

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/compo...rt/Itemid,189/

I had the same issue. I upgraded to 20 meg and was only getting 7 meg. I had an old Netgear RP614 router. I upgraded to a newer, faster model and now I get the full 20 meg, and I'm in Reading (RG6).

I am also in the RG6 area, and originally got very poor speeds, however, recently, the service appears to have stabilised giving around 12meg most of the time.

In the evenings it typically drops to around 5meg.