There’s nothing more frustrating than slow or unreliable broadband. Well, apart from not having broadband at all – that would be worse… the more time you spend online, the more you take internet access for granted…
But we live in an age where internet access is a basic human right for some people. It won’t be long before it’s a basic human right for all of us. Like food or security. So i’m obviously not the only one who can’t make do without broadband for any length of time 🙂
At the minute, vodafone home broadband is unusable. Here’s some ping times to google.com. The ‘time’ should be under about 50ms. Notice it’s approaching 3000ms which is a mere 60 times slower than it should be 🙄
‘Request timed out’ means it’s so slow the computer got fed up waiting.
What’s the cause?
There’s a few possible causes, all of which won’t be easy to pinpoint or fix…
One possible cause is line degradation. Just an old line getting older and more unreliable. Can’t carry the signal as well as it could do in the past. The chances of that are slim as the line is less than 5 years old (in a new estate)…
Another possible cause is noise on the line. The council are digging up every road in sight (in monaghan town) at the minute, just for the craic. Or at least that’s what it seems like. With diggers and jackhammers and god knows what else running about the place, it can’t possibly help with noise on lines.
Apart from that, i’m clueless. It’s not a problem with my own set up… i’ve plugged the PC directly in to the modem and shut down all other electrical devices that could possibly cause interference.
A few months back i had the same problem. Vodafone downgraded the line to 4mb from 7mb. Nice of them. In all honesty that didn’t do much only slow me down at certain times. I didn’t care though as i’d prefer reliability over speed. Which is something that i still haven’t gotten. Instead i’ve gotten unreliability and poor speed. So it’s time to start hassling them again…
O2 save the day
All summer long i rarely used my o2 mobile broadband. But it’s at times like this where it really pays for itself. If i had an unlimited download cap, i’d probably use it more often at home but hopefully once enhanced broadband arrives, home broadband problems will go away and we’ll all live happily ever after…