Slow web browsing b15 (Birmingham)

[psyche1701]

Hi anyone else in Birmingham having difficulty web-browsing in the Birmingham area (B15 in particular)?

It's been like this for several days now - but most noticably Friday/Saturday/Sunday/Today... pages are slow to load, lots of errors and broken images. Strangely - I can login to an online game (City of Heroes) without any lag/speed problems at all. Also, when downloading a large file it takes a while to actually connect and 'get going' but then download speeds are about 390kb/s which is what we normally get. It's the web browsing that it slow.

As it stands, Web Browsing is unusable. Typically www.bbc.co.uk might take several minutes to load (and even then, with lots of broken images) - and this is the same for every page we go to. Even Loading pages on these forums is a long and painful process - far worse than dialup. It's a case of set the page loading, go away for a couple of minutes, then come back and it MIGHT have finished loading.

We phoned VM and went through a series of things (turning modem PC on/off, turning firewalls on/off... resetting stuff, etc nothing helped) - the call ended without a resolution and we're still stuck with poor browsing. Wondered if this could be a service fault rather than us (we've changed nothing on our PC) so interested to hear if anyone else in the area has experienced these problems?

We're on VM - used to be a telewest/blueyonder package. We're using a Motorola SB4100 modem and the connection should be 4mb (it's an old tw package)

Traceroute and ping to www.bbc.co.uk says:

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.226.232]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms * 7 ms 10.69.128.1
2 8 ms 9 ms 8 ms pc-62-30-247-193-do.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.247.
193]
3 15 ms 28 ms 15 ms pc-62-30-247-89-do.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.247.8
9]
4 7 ms 7 ms 8 ms perr-t3core-1b-ge-010-0.inet.ntl.com [80.0.176.1
29]
5 * 8 ms 8 ms bir-bb-b-so-500-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.175.185]

6 10 ms 12 ms 11 ms nth-bb-a-so-300-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.105]

7 21 ms * 15 ms gfd-bb-b-so-010-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.98]
8 * 15 ms 14 ms redb-ic-1-so-700-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.78]

9 19 ms 15 ms 16 ms 212.58.238.189
10 16 ms 15 ms 15 ms 212.58.238.133
11 17 ms 15 ms 16 ms 212.58.238.141
12 14 ms 18 ms 15 ms 212.58.226.232

Trace complete.

****

Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.226.232] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 212.58.226.232: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=117
Request timed out.
Reply from 212.58.226.232: bytes=32 time=14ms TTL=117
Reply from 212.58.226.232: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=117

Ping statistics for 212.58.226.232:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 14ms, Maximum = 16ms, Average = 15ms

[LiamTG]

Yesterday I was experiencing speeds of 2mb instead of 10 and that's on newsgroups!

I reset my modem after about 10 minutes and all was back to normal.

[blade85]

I live in the B5 area but everything seems to be running just fine as always.

still getting the full 4 meg download speed (around 480-500kbps)

Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.224.87]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms 35 ms 9 ms 10.72.64.1
2 11 ms 8 ms 10 ms pc-62-30-247-225-do.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.247.225]
3 14 ms 18 ms 20 ms pc-62-30-247-93-do.blueyonder.co.uk [62.30.247.93]
4 8 ms 8 ms 15 ms perr-t3core-1b-ge-010-0.inet.ntl.com [80.0.176.129]
5 11 ms 7 ms 8 ms bir-bb-b-so-500-0.inet.ntl.com [213.105.175.185]
6 26 ms 10 ms 10 ms nth-bb-a-so-300-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.105]
7 13 ms 21 ms 12 ms gfd-bb-b-so-010-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.98]
8 15 ms 15 ms 19 ms redb-ic-1-so-700-0.inet.ntl.com [62.253.185.78]
9 58 ms 119 ms 21 ms 212.58.238.189
10 27 ms 17 ms 16 ms 212.58.238.133
11 16 ms 14 ms 17 ms www50.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.224.87]

Trace complete.


Pinging www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.224.87] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 212.58.224.87: bytes=32 time=21ms TTL=244
Reply from 212.58.224.87: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=244
Reply from 212.58.224.87: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=244
Reply from 212.58.224.87: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=244

Ping statistics for 212.58.224.87:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 16ms, Maximum = 21ms, Average = 18ms

[psyche1701]

After an awful weekend... the connection returned to normal a couple of hours ago. We didn't change a thing.. one minute it was crawwlllling through webpages - next, it popped back to life and we were downloading everything at normal speeds. Web pages appear quickly... www.bbc.co.uk loads in a couple of seconds or less, everything's ok now.

Very strange!!??

I can only imagine that they fixed something somewhere (since nothing at all has changed this-end.)

[christopherw]

The Brum area is currently being upgraded for 20Mb rollout. I imagine that'll have had something to do with it... And, from what I've read (on this forum) all customers who aren't currently on 20Mb (I guess that includes XL customers on 10Mb like me) are throttled to 2Mb in the day "to ensure fair bandwidth share for everyone on the network" (paraphrased).

Bit rubbish innit :/ (B16, Harborne UBR4 here)

[psyche1701]

Unfortunately this problem seems to have re-occured in the last few days... web-browsing is once again near-impossible thanks to appalling speed and problems making connections to sites - once again, BBC is taking minutes to load rather than seconds, etc. FAR below what we would get on dial-up (which I would resort to, if we had a BT line) so we're stuck with it. Traceroute and pings are once again similar to what I posted earlier.

Web browsing would actually be fine if we HAD been downgraded to 2MB - this is far worse than that... pages are stuck at the loading stage, sitting there with a blank/empty screen for over 2-3 minutes on some sites.

What I don't understand is if they're doing work on the lines why can't they mention it on their update pages so we know what's happening - or at least make their call centre staff aware of what's happening so they can tell us when we call? We wasted a load of money phoning tech support last week when the original problem happened and the guy was at a loss as to what had happened and we didn't get it sorted....Then randomly on Monday the connection came back as good as new, before going downhill towards the weekend and then as bad as ever Fri/Sat/Sun (so far)

Frustrating!