On 11-Jun-06 Ian bell wrote:
(Ted Harding) wrote:
[...] Compared with old ADSL, MAX tends to fluctuate a lot, and you can easily get temporary disconnections when it switches to a different sync rate. This especially occurs during the first few (can be up to double figures) days.
I am well past the upgrade cycle. I get lots (several tens) of disconnections a day, some lasting a second and some lasting several minutes. Sync rate has settled down though.
That's a lot of disconnections! Whle (on a relatively poor line) I was getting up to say 20/day during the first 3-4 weeks, t did later settle down to say 3-6. But sync rate tended to fluctuate (until I did something about it), mainly I suspect because "BT" reckoned I could be speeded up during good line conditions, only to drop me a bit later when this proved unsustainable. Now I've set a config parameter in my router which caps its sync rate, and I've been sync'ing at a fixed rate ever since (a bit lower than the cap), and also getting absolutely steady throughput. I still get the occasional complete lockout, though, which has nothing to do with re-sync'ing but seems to be related to "congestion" in the router (wherever that comes from).
When you reboot, it's all fresh and easy-going for a while, until it decides to fiddle with things. For all that MAX claims to home in on your "maximum stable rate", a lot of people have found it to be persistently *un*stable.
That's me. In some ways I was happier with my 2Mbps link - at least it was pretty consistent.
Yes ... pre-Max, it was like having a vehicle for which you'd paid to be allowed to drive it up to 20mph, and you could take it on ordinary quiet roads without too much grief. Post-Max, your vehicle has been "upgraded" so that you are allowed to take it onto the big fast roads -- its built-in speed control mechanism will adapt to set the speed at "the maximum sustainable speed" -- which, on A11/A14, is ... ?
Even when it holds the sync rate steady, the actual download throughput can vary considerably.
I am aware of that. At present I get a steady deterioration. Ealier this evening it was down to 190kbps - then after a reset it was back to its normal 3800kbps.
Again, this was my regular experience prior to capping the sync. Early in the day it would usually be at the high end, then drop a bit, and usually stay steady until sometime in the evening, when it would drop markedly. This sort of thing is usually put down to (a) increased contention in the evenings; (b) deterioration of line quality in the course of the evening and overnight.
However, mine never dropeed to anything as low as your 190Kbit/s. That looks exceptionaly low to me (though, again, there have been punters on the Zen forum who reported similar rates on what were nominally connections as good as yours, i.e. syncing at 8128).
For protracted discussions of this sort of phenomenon, have a trawl throught the Zen Broadband Support Forum:
There has been a lot of discussion of this too on my isp's (ukfsn) forum.
I've tried a few times to find a forum on UKFSN's website -- since I'm interested in reading what their users say -- but never found a link to one on their website. Is it restricted to UKFSN subscribers, or am I simply missing something?
Frankly, this Max is proving a bit bewildering to many people. It has a tendency to perform unsatisfactorily, and it seems to be impossible to probe into the background reasons. In particular, it always raises the question of whether it's BT, or the line, or the user's own equipment.
I've also seen people asking for advice on whether there are better routers than the one they're using; but few replies have really addressed the question.
Hopefully, someone on ALUG will be more expert (and more forthcoming) about such questions.
Good luck! (And, if there's a URL for the UKFSN forum, I'd be obliged to learn it).
Best wishes, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 12-Jun-06 Time: 09:07:51 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------