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I live less than one and a half miles from the centre of a major European city. We currently get 0.24Mbits/s download and 0.37Mbits/s upload on ADSL over the ph

I live less than one and a half miles from the centre of a major European city. We currently get 0.24Mbits/s download and 0.37Mbits/s upload on ADSL over the phone line. My broadband provider's help line have confirmed no faults on line, or with my router (I've swapped the cables, router, and tried several computers). They think its an automatic profiling change because we are often away from home and switch the router off. I'm battling my way through the help line 'levels' which is proving to be 'interesting'. I may go to a smaller more expensive provider in the new year just so I can run an rdp session and get an interface I can work on. The low bandwidth experiment has been educational. On Firefox/Ubuntu, you get the little status bar at the bottom that shows the requests. Some pages have a lot of those, and take ages to load. Distro-hopping is feasible (I'm trying out different interfaces), a CD-ROM downloads overnight quite easily. Software updates are a killer (go and have dinner, listen to some music...). I've started using a command line web client (w3m in my case) to get to the text more quickly. You get to see which sites have 'skip to content' links embedded early in the page and with CSS set to not show them on Firefox. You also get to see which sites provide all content via html and which sites 'wrap up' their content in javascript functions &c. As many here provide Web content and applications, just try a command line Web browser on your site...

pretoriusB 14y ago
>They think its an automatic profiling change because we are often away from home and switch the router off. Why switch the router off? Just leave it running, it's not like it uses much power...
- keithpeter 14y ago
  >Why switch the router off? Just leave it running, it's not like it uses much power... I'm eccentric. I switch off the electricity, gas and water when leaving the house for longer than an overnight stay. I'm also dubious: I've had this connection running for 4 years with the same use pattern and this 'profiling' thing has only been happening for the last couple of months. I'm also not clear why if it is software controlled rate limiting, someone can't just go and click a button somewhere! It is surprising what I can do on 0.24Mbit/s/40mS latency. It makes fat Web pages slow, and YouTube silly. RDP is the killer, my work Windows 7 desktop is just painful to use. I pop down-town to a coffee shop.
adrinavarro 14y ago
I'm three miles away and I easily get 3 Mbps. Check your line (mostly attenuation and SNR). I've got 53dB attenuation and a SNR (ratio) of 10dB. Plus, uptime is pretty good (over 13 days now).
- keithpeter 14y ago
  They claim to know that it is not the phone line itself. What are you using to measure the attenuation/signal to noise? I have to say the upload speed being faster than the download speed, together with the lack of any drop-outs or instability in the connection did make me wonder about rate limiting.

pretoriusB 14y ago

>They think its an automatic profiling change because we are often away from home and switch the router off. Why switch the router off? Just leave it running, it's not like it uses much power...

keithpeter 14y ago
>Why switch the router off? Just leave it running, it's not like it uses much power... I'm eccentric. I switch off the electricity, gas and water when leaving the house for longer than an overnight stay. I'm also dubious: I've had this connection running for 4 years with the same use pattern and this 'profiling' thing has only been happening for the last couple of months. I'm also not clear why if it is software controlled rate limiting, someone can't just go and click a button somewhere! It is surprising what I can do on 0.24Mbit/s/40mS latency. It makes fat Web pages slow, and YouTube silly. RDP is the killer, my work Windows 7 desktop is just painful to use. I pop down-town to a coffee shop.

adrinavarro 14y ago

I'm three miles away and I easily get 3 Mbps. Check your line (mostly attenuation and SNR). I've got 53dB attenuation and a SNR (ratio) of 10dB. Plus, uptime is pretty good (over 13 days now).

keithpeter 14y ago
They claim to know that it is not the phone line itself. What are you using to measure the attenuation/signal to noise? I have to say the upload speed being faster than the download speed, together with the lack of any drop-outs or instability in the connection did make me wonder about rate limiting.