Poor Download Speeds

[neo123]

I recently upgraded to '10' Meg. And my speeds are extremely intermittent. I can somtimes get as low as under 2 Meg, there isnt a specific time range when i do get the full ten meg, but when i do, it is only from a strictly UK server.

Anything outside of the UK, slows down to an amazing 2/3 Megs. Although i know server location makes a difference i didnt realize it would be this much.

I phoned NTL twice, and i know i sound like an ass like everyone getting on the bash-ntl-support bandwagon. But it was terrible, i could barely understand what he was saying. He 'Refreshed my signal levels' then tried me on all sorts of noob tactics i had already tried, and pointed out to him. And then he told me to do a NETSTAT in the command prompt and said these are the applications that are slowing your connection.

There is no way that a few background processes like that (clean ones at that) can eat up that much bandwidth, i know this for a fact.

*Rant Over* So what can I do?? any ideas?

[IanUK]

Speeds to many sites outside of the UK slow down drastically in the late afternoon to evening (and some Euro ones too), due to NTL's (NTL@s) terrible peering arrangements, this affects many people, but NTL ignore any reports about it.

We are stuck with it, they seem unable or unwilling to fix it.
They should really advertise the service as 'up to 10 meg in the UK' and 'up to 5 meg to Europe' and 'up to 3 meg to the USA'
I feel your pain on the 'Tech Support' line as well, been there too.

Some peering is fine, but a lot is rubbish.

[Insector]

I get warp 9.6 from usa

[neo123]

Just proves the incosistancy of service then does'nt it. I am going to phone them now again, see if there is ANYTHING they can do to improve my speeds.

[Ignition]

Have you done anything to test your own settings, for example your RWIN, etc.

The tweaktest on http://www.broadbandreports.com will assist with this.

The rest is probably just contention, but a bit of tweaking might improve things to USA.

[neo123]

Already done, my MTU and everything else is optimised for 10 meg. I know near enough 100% that this is NTL's side and not mine.

[Chrysalis]

max you can probably expect even with tweaking per thread is around 500kB from usa, eu and uk should easily max 10meg in a thread but like ianuk said their is some peering problems at current. If you are able to max out the 10meg with 3 or 4 threads it is probably just down to rwin and distance.