Tearing my hair out since 2Mb to 4Mb upgrade!

Trancemaster · 21-07-2006, 17:44

Hey all. I'm hoping someone can advise me here before I go totally crazy. I've been on NTL broadband for about 3-4 years now. On the original 512K, then 600 etc, and am now on (supposedly) 4Mb.

I didn't know anything about the speed increases until my next door neighbour who is also on NTL told me he was getting much faster speeds on Usenet. I checked with the NTL speed upgrade page which said I was already on 4Mb, despite my speed never reaching more than 270Kb/s. So, I rebooted the modem and presto! I'm on 4Mb. I was really, really happy with that.

Which is where the problem began. Since then I have had nothing but connection and speed problems. The speed regularly drops from 470Kb/s (ish) to around 20Kb/s which is absolutely diabolical for a 4Mb service. If I reboot the modem I get decent speeds for about 5 minutes before it drops way, way down, sometimes to as little as 11Kb/s. My modem is an Ambit 200 and I live in Derby.

Speed test result from ADSL Guide:

Speed Test Results (Friday, 21 July 2006, 17:24)
Downstream75.8 Kbps( = 0.1 Mbps ) Upstream35.5 Kbps( = 0.0 Mbps )

Cable modem levels:

Downstream Receive Power Level : -11.9 dBmVDownstream SNR : 31.0 dB

Is this good? I checked the sticky thread about power levels but came away not much the wiser.

I work in tech support so I have some troubleshooting experience when it comes to things like this and since these problems only started occuring when I rebooted my modem onto 4Mb the only reasons I can think of for these problems are:

1) Noise level is too great.
2) Modem cannot handle the increased speed (it regularly gets hot to the touch since the upgrade, though the hot weather could account for that I suppose)
3) Entire network is not able to cope with so many people suddenly on increased speeds (long shot, but hey!)

Is an engineer likely to be able to resolve this problem, because if not I would rather go back to having reliable 2Mb than **** poor 4Mb, even if the price is the same.

Anyone offer any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!
No apologies for length (or girth)