My daughter has a Virgin media cable 10mbit internet connection. When I checked the speed yesterday I was given a reading of http://www.speedtest.net/result/595577585.png on speedtest. For a 10mbit connection this seems to be very slow. Any ideas on why is is so slow and what can be done to speed it up?
couple of ideas come to mind. 1. faulty line and you need to ring virgin - i have 10mb line too and always get 9-10mb. 2. you have gone over the download limit between either 10am-3pm (3000mb MAX) or 4-9pm (1500mb MAX) and your speed has been throttled for 5 hours. have you checked more than once and left at least 5 hours inbetween testing ???
Couple of other ideas that come to mind: a) Your daughters machine is horribly infested with Malware using the bandwidth? b) Her wireless is not secured and bandwidth is being leeched? Or poorly secured and someone broke in. c) Using Win 2000 or XP and haven't used TCPOptimizer? d) The modem is a dud. But there's probably a line fault of some kind in the mix .. Crazy B
You guys have forgotten the plain and simple - if her area is busy it'll get throttled during busy periods, just like every other mainstream provider.
it shouldnt do with virgin thats why they do traffic shaping and download limits between certain hours. but i guess yeah it could dopesnt do it on mine but i only live in a big village
Get an ethernet cable that is long enough to reach between the computer in questions and the modem/router. Connect 1 end of the cable to the pc and the other to the modem router and make sure the internet connection is working. Re test on the same server you tested on and check your speeds then. I had the exact same problem and was only getting around 3 or 4MBs (if im lucky) through the wireless. Plugged in an ethernet cable and my speeds shot right up to 10/12MBs. Hope this helps
Not sure about other countries, but most cable providers in the states have a shared connection with the neighboorhood at the street lvl box. So when the neighbors' are busy your connection will suffer.
Good call .. if she is using wireless the issue could be a weak or unstable connection or even a USB wifi adapter on a near-capacity USB hub (e.g. webcam, network adapter, ipod & barking Father Christmas all plugged in) Yip .. we have that too - it's called "contention" - the number of subscribers effectively sharing a certain amount of bandwidth - which is usually less than the total of their combined maximum achievable b/w. When a few are on it's all good and when everyone is on, depending on your provider it's a bit slower to pretty unusable at times. This is more of an issue as I understand it with DSL lines over the telephone than with cable although the throttling and download limits of Virgin imply it's part of their set up too (never personally used them). This combined with WIFI will really kill your D/L speeds. If you haven't heard of TCPOptimizer and are using XP or Win2K then check it out and try it. If usig it on a WIFI adapter back up your config first as it *can* have a detrimental effect but not usually. On wired connections it can double your speed or more depending on the PC config. Crazy B
The best way to solve these issues are too look where the delay or loss is happening, if its a line or network issue on the ISP end then you will see it on there network, If its a wireless issue you will see the issue on the local side, The tool I use to test this and many companies use is WinMTR its a free tool from sourceforge http://winmtr.sourceforge.net/ Just put in an address say google, then run the test for about 100 pings and that should give you a good average you can run for longer and its advisable to do it at 1 hour intervals for consistancy of the tests, Then post the results here and we can take a look at where it might be going wrong.
the wireless connection could be an issue, as said previously if it is unsecured, you could be getting other users in your area using your bandwidth. You can go into command prompt and type net view, which will show you the names of the machines on your network. Do a search online for information on how to password your wireless router. I would however looked at using a wired connection as this is always the fastest method. If running a long ethernet cable is not an option, you could look into powerLine which is faster than wireless but not quite as fast as a wired connection. To can use the tracert command to test where the main lags in the connection are being caused, e.g. tracert www.google.co.uk. The will show you the hops and how long each will take, and let you not if the problem is at your end of the servers. In most cases it is going to be at your end though. As you can see with previous posts it can be causes by a multitude of different reasons, try of few of the suggestions, and let us know how you get on as this will help pin point the problem.
Thanks for the replies, however this thread is over 2 years old and my daughter is no longer with virgin.
