speed and consistency at last

speed

For the past several months, my home broadband has been plagued with speed & consistency problems. Worse than dial-up speed one minute, 7mb the next. Peak times were the real killer…

Coincidence?

This morning at exactly 12.00am, our connection dropped and it hadn’t come back by 1am when i last checked. I thought that was strange, i’m used to having poor speed and random disconnects every once in a while but a complete outage for an hour or more is extremely rare and that fact it happened at exactly 12.00am made me suspicious.

I had hoped that this was a sign ‘enhanced’ broadband was finally coming to Monaghan – enhanced meaning ‘uncongested’ broadband. The root of all of my problems was ‘congested’ broadband… things tend to have gotten patchy from about 5pm – 11pm (a.k.a peak times).

I know what you’re up to

I’ve been monitoring my speed on speedtest.net and also checking my router’s stats all evening to see if there were any changes being made or anything out of the ordinary. At about 9pm, the router disconnected me about 3 times at which stage i got fed up and plugged it out, then rebooted it. But before i did that i noticed that my line profile stats showed an ‘attainable rate’ of 8.8mb, meaning that’s the maximum speed my line could handle.

line stats

After rebooting, that dropped to 6.4mb which i was angry about. A little while later, it went back to 8.4mb and my current speed is showing as 7mb. In reality i’m getting about 6mb according to speedtest which i’m more than happy with (i’m used to seeing speeds of below 0.1mb at peak times).

Enhanced or a fluke?

It’s difficult to tell whether this means i have enhanced broadband or not, i can’t find any info online to suggest that’s the case but then again this is Ireland and eircom we’re talking about. Communication is what they specialize in but it’s also their biggest downfall.

Anyway, i really don’t care what they’ve done or are doing to the local exchanges or indeed to my line profile, so long as i can get consistent speed. That’s all i ask for. Anything over 3mb will do me fine, so long as it’s consistent and i can rely on it 24/7.

Time will tell whether or not today was a fluke or whether this kind of consistent speed is here to stay, but fingers crossed it’s the latter… there is nothing more frustrating than not being able to play videos in real time. It’s like being stuck behind a tractor with a string of oncoming traffic and no end of it in sight.

Leave a Reply