AOhell woes.

Ian D J

Ian D J

Michael Fish
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Ian D J
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For some strange reason my normally reliable platinum 8 mpbs service is acting up. It's connection has been reduced to a mere trickle lately.
In the past, I've always been getting 7 mbps connections which in my books is quite good - but in the past couple of weeks it had been spluttering along at 200 kps to 700 kps. My sister, who lives around the corner from me is also experiencing the same trouble.
My sister phoned up an AOL representive about it and told him the problem we are experiencing, only for him to say that "700 kps is impressive".
To get only 1/10th of the service we pay for isn't exactly what I call "impressive".
The trouble is, I've been with AOL for nigh on ten years and I really don't want to faff about with MAC codes if I want to migrate over to a new internet provider, and like I said earlier, for as long as I've been with them, they always have provided a reliable service. That was the case until two weeks ago.
Any of you AOL users experiencing the same thing? Is it all part of server upgrades, or something's gone horribly wrong ever since Carphone Warehouse took it over?
 
Either there are loads of happy AOL users, or no-one uses AOL. :D :D :D
Last night, at 10 pm, I could not even get onto the internet. I have 3 PCs (two wireless and one directly connected to the router) dotted around the house and could not get online with all of them. Tried unplugging router and putting it back on and checked all connections, etc, etc, and although all 4 status lights were all flashing (indiciating nomal status) I've still not been able to get online.
This morning at 6.45 am, it's all fine. Ran an online speedcheck and it returned my normal 7 mbps connection speed.
But it is running me ragged, though. Never had it this bad before.
 
It could have been a fault on the BT line, I've had it a couple of times and unless your using cable, it wouldnt make a difference which ISP you were using. It really annoys me when you know there is a fault at the exchange but the BT switchboard are adamant that its your PC that's at fault.
 
It used to be a pain changing ISPs, but it's a doddle these days:) Unless you're with Tiscali - I've had nothing but trouble changing people away from them....
Get MAC from old ISP, give to new ISP. On changeover day, change the username/password in your router to the new one. Easy as pie :)

If you have Sky TV, I'd have to recommend them for internet as well...
 
reddeathdrinker said:
If you have Sky TV, I'd have to recommend them for internet as well...
Click to expand...

I can vouch for that. I am on the surf see speak package with all 6 mixes, noone else comes in cheaper and I get a constant 8mbps connection. It helps that I am very close to the exchange so can get a large bandwidth. I am considering going up to 16 mpbs as I am close enough.

But certainly a :thumbs: for sky BB.
 
Thanks for your replies everyone.
I'm that little bit closer to packing in AOL in favour for another ISP as after 2 days of normal fast connections, it failed yesterday but this time I was unable to get online all day from 12 pm until 12 am last night (apart from a brief hour of sub-50 kbps performance in the afternoon, just barely enough juice to post that cartoon in here before the internet closed up on me). The same thing happened to my sister who lives around the corner. It might well be the telephone exchange but another phone call to AOL is saying that there is a cluster of failure reports around my area and they are working on it to resolve it.
And now it's Sunday morning and it's all back to normal where the latest speed tests returned 9.8 mbps!
Mind you, if it has to break down, why couldn't it do that while I'm at work, instead of during Saturday afternoon and evening? It was enough to make me realise how much I take the 'net for granted, possibly to think about giving up on it and lead a normal life. :D
Naaaaaaaaa, pigs may fly. :bonk:
A shame really as the past couple of week is a blemish on what was actually a fault-free ten years relationship with AOL. Maybe Connie's getting bored of me.
 
Ian, I once had AOL for my broadband (back in the 512K-1MB broadband days!) and I had nothing but trouble with them. Switched to BT and have been using them virtually trouble-free for the passed 5 years. I, however have never been able to get more than 550kbps on my 8MB line, but it's fast enough for me...
 
ekimeno said:
Ian, I once had AOL for my broadband (back in the 512K-1MB broadband days!) and I had nothing but trouble with them. Switched to BT and have been using them virtually trouble-free for the passed 5 years. I, however have never been able to get more than 550kbps on my 8MB line, but it's fast enough for me...
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Hi Mike (you don't mind me calling you by your real name?). I'm not sure I would be too happy paying full price and getting only 1/16th of the service.
Oh I'm aware that we will never get the full "advertised" speed due to contention ratios, quality of cables and exchange distances but I've always been getting 5 mb to 7 mb (even been known to peak above 8 mb!) on this AOL 8 mb broadband service I've had in the past 3 years and that's quite good in my books. It's only when I've been getting 38 kbps to 150 kbps speeds and sometimes none at all in the past couple of weeks that's causing me to wonder what's going on. Kinda reminded me of my old dial-up days with AOL just at the turn of the millennium.
I do use iPlayer a lot and am a huge youtube fan (probably me that's bringing internet servers down to their knees!) and felt really lost without all that yesterday.
Sad I know but that's me.
Anyway, it all seems to be back to normal now, so here's hoping.
 
I have worked for a couple of ISP for the last 6 years and ADSL connection speed is the number 1 issue that end users complain about the most.
I thought I would give my 2p worth from their prespective and hopefully shed a bit of light on the dark world of SPEED :)

ADSL (which is what 99% of all resdidential end users have) is an upgrade of the old "Dial-Up 56k modem speeds of the past. ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) is just that - Asynchronous - more download speed that upload speed and these range from 512k up and 256k down to VDSL 53Mb up and 13Mb down.

A typical voice conversation over the "local loop" or "last mile" (your house to the exchane) was in the region of 300Hz-3KHz and and bandwidth above 3KHz went unused and this is where the DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) uses this spare bandwidth up to about 1Mhz.
This as mentioned is supplied over the last mile and connects from your house into a DSLAM (aka DeeSlam - (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor) which basically collects all the users in your street and "Multiplexes" these connections and Converts these into a single connection normally using ATM (dont want to get too technical, but users either connect via PPoA or PPoE).
Now this ADSL speed is (depending on ISP) "shared" between usually 50 other residences in your area. This 16Mbps you have ordered is not for your sole use at all as it is shared between 50 of you.
So, problems arise where your neighbour is downloading music via BitTorrent or Kazaa etc and another one is watching movies on demand etc and soon enough your 16Mbps connection to the internet is abysmially slow and the frustration kicks in. I hate slow connections just as much as any one else but that is the the nature of the beast I'm afarid.

There are other DSL options available that will take you down to 20 shared connectins but these will usually cost more, so one would need to weigh up the costs etc for better speeds.
Now if we were in South Korea with Fibre Optics 100Mbs - we would be smiling !!;)

HTH
Cheers
Wallis
 
Ian D J said:
Hi Mike (you don't mind me calling you by your real name?). I'm not sure I would be too happy paying full price and getting only 1/16th of the service.
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Ian (you can call me Mike! ;)) My apologies - if ~I'm downloading something, the speed on my browser's download window usually comes up as 550kbps, though I understand that this is not a true reflection of internet speed. When I run a broadband speed check, my line comes in at 4300kbps down and 290kps up. Not really sure if this is a good or bad thing TBH :shrug:
 
Download speed of a file is dependant on the upload speed of the server hosting it - the speed checker result will be the more accurate...
 
ciscokid said:
I have worked for a couple of ISP for the last 6 years and ADSL connection speed is the number 1 issue that end users complain about the most.
I thought I would give my 2p worth from their prespective and hopefully shed a bit of light on the dark world of SPEED :)

ADSL (which is what 99% of all resdidential end users have) is an upgrade of the old "Dial-Up 56k modem speeds of the past. ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) is just that - Asynchronous - more download speed that upload speed and these range from 512k up and 256k down to VDSL 53Mb up and 13Mb down.

A typical voice conversation over the "local loop" or "last mile" (your house to the exchane) was in the region of 300Hz-3KHz and and bandwidth above 3KHz went unused and this is where the DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) uses this spare bandwidth up to about 1Mhz.
This as mentioned is supplied over the last mile and connects from your house into a DSLAM (aka DeeSlam - (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexor) which basically collects all the users in your street and "Multiplexes" these connections and Converts these into a single connection normally using ATM (dont want to get too technical, but users either connect via PPoA or PPoE).
Now this ADSL speed is (depending on ISP) "shared" between usually 50 other residences in your area. This 16Mbps you have ordered is not for your sole use at all as it is shared between 50 of you.
So, problems arise where your neighbour is downloading music via BitTorrent or Kazaa etc and another one is watching movies on demand etc and soon enough your 16Mbps connection to the internet is abysmially slow and the frustration kicks in. I hate slow connections just as much as any one else but that is the the nature of the beast I'm afarid.

There are other DSL options available that will take you down to 20 shared connectins but these will usually cost more, so one would need to weigh up the costs etc for better speeds.
Now if we were in South Korea with Fibre Optics 100Mbs - we would be smiling !!;)

HTH
Cheers
Wallis
Click to expand...

Wow, you really do know your stuff, and I'd happily go along with it. But how come it's suddenly become a problem in the past two weeks after 3 years of virtually faultless and constant performance.
I've had a good day today, web pages coming up in the blink of an eye, checked speed: 7 mbps speeds, sweeeeet . . . until suddenly 10 minutes ago it's down to sub 50 kbps speeds. It took the best part of a minute just to get this message box to appear.
So all this is down to a neighbour suddenly having got broadband and being into downloading bittorrents and viewing iPlayer and Youtube? Like I said in an earlier post, I know there are stuff as contention ratio, quality of line and distance from exchange but surely even if all 50 people do get online at the same time, it shouldn't reduce me down to sub 56k modem speed?

EDIT (update): Shortly after I managed to drop off that above post at about 8 pm, the connection went dead - even though my router was showing all normal status.
It's now 10.15 pm and suddenly it's allliiiiiiiive. Suddenly it sprang back to life once again and running a whisker short of 8 mb speeds.
 
Hi Ian
With this erratic behaviour its usually the fault of the carrier and can be a number of causes, from line card malfunction in the DSLAM to routing problems on the ISP's backbone due to link failure or "flapping" of the routing protocols going from an up to down state causing traffic to be constantly re-routed over any redundant links.
The best thing is to call them and speak to the the 3rd line support guys BUT you have to have something to give them instead of the " I have a slow connection".

What I reccomend and this goes for anyone who may be reading this is to take 2 or 3 base line samples when the connection is good and keep them in a text file somewhere where you can compare when the link starts playing up.

The tool I would reccomend is to use pathping (this comes as a default tool with XP and Vista (which in my opinion is closest thing to a malicious virus yet to hit the general public).
With XP - Start->Run and type in cmd
Vista browse to Windows->System32 and scroll to cmd.exe and right click and "Run as Administrator"

A black box will appear amd type in pathping 4.2.2.2 (or any IP you want - I just use 4.2.2.2 as this is a DNS server in the US and I can see what the latency is when the traffic goes over the pond:)
Once this traceroute has completed it does further calculations based on congestion and this can take some minutes so be patient. The results might mean a lot of garbage but sending this info through helps the 3rd line tech guys to investigate the issues further. Plus they will appreciate the effort you took in helping them get the info they need.

Another thing to try is to disconnect and shut down your router completely -that means turn it off and keep it off for at least 15mins.
This is done so as to flush your session with the DSLAM. Sometimes we get what is called a "stale" session and this usually plays havoc with the link when your router thinks its on line and the DSLAM "hangs" your current session. Turning off the router clears this and a new session is rebuilt.
IF ther are any queries I will be happy to try and help out

Hope this helps :)
Cheers
Wallis
 
Hi Wallis, thank you for putting together that post and I will try and follow the suggestions you have come up with. Seems that you do know your stuff! I did have this idea of "flushing" the router by shoving it down the toilet!
Anyway, my connection magically came back to life at 10 pm Sunday and it's been fine since then. At precisely the same time, the same thing happened to my sister's AOL broadband (she lives a couple of roads up from me, about 100 yards). Both of us were experiencing the same flucuations in connection speeds and outages.
Because of that, we have been noting down the timings the old fashioned way in the past couple of weeks, and also been running print offs of an online speed test. We also have been ringing AOL of the problem and they did say that they are "experiencing technical difficulties" and that there will be some outages while they try and resolve the issue.
What I have come up with wasn't terribly technical I know (I'm just a lowly tomato farmer) but when my connection does go wrong and I would try and find out why it's doing that, I can't get online to find out why. And then when it comes back to normal, it feels like there's no need to find out why!:D
I willl print off this thread for future reference, though.
Anyway, thanks for all them replies and I'm hoping as much as you are that this will be the last we'll hear of this. :)
 
(I'm just a lowly tomato farmer)
Click to expand...

Ahh.. farming - I miss it terribly!! I grew up in South Africa in Zululand (very close to a lot of English/Zulu/Boer battelfields) where we were farming sugar cane and tomatoes. (Which by the way - the tomatoes ,Dad was able to send me to a very good school!!) I'm not sure what the price of tomatoes are these days but hopefully they are seeing you through :)
 
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