I ordered the naked DSL service from AT&T at the highest speed, the “Elite” service, which is supposed to offer 6 mbps download speeds. I hooked everything up and installed it, and I can access the internet, but it’s incredibly slow. When I run the speed test on AT&T’s site, I get 594 kbps down and 245 kbps up. I called tech support, but they said it could take up to a week for it to get up to full speed. I’ve had DSL before, though, and it was never this slow to start out.
A couple of other things I noticed: It’s a Westell 6100 modem/router, and when I go “check connection,” everything passes except for ASDL, which says “Fail.” Also, when I was hooking it up, the phone jack fell into the wall, so I had to take the plate off to get it back, and I noticed there was one white wire that was not hooked into the phone jack. Could this be the problem? Or would it not work at all if there were a wiring problem?
I’m guessing your signal is spectacularly bad but just barely usable. The Internet protocols (TCP, in specific) are designed to keep working even if a lot of information is lost, but they work by resending what got dropped. That makes things slower.
I looked under “statistics” on the modem, and here’s the ADSL information:
To Modem To Internet
Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 832 288
SN Margin (dB) 6 6
Line Attenuation (dB) 63 31
Loss of Signal 2 -
Loss of Frame - -
CRC Errors 2196 23
I have no idea what a “CRC Error” is, but I assume it’s bad…
CRC is Cyclic Redundancy Check. It’s a standard method of verifying a data stream was transmitted correctly. 63 dB of downstream line attenuation seems way too high to me. There seems to be a problem with your line.
By “main socket,” do you mean the phone jack closest to wherever the phone line comes in? I have no idea. I’m in a multi-unit apartment building. The entire building is also wired with Cat 5, but the company that ran that T1 service has sold it off to another provider and they won’t be turning it back on until later this year.
ETA: I take that back - this is the only phone jack in the entire apartment. It has two jacks on the faceplate; the one on top is the Cat 5. All the other jacks in the apartment are Cat 5.
The “main socket” would be what’s called the demarc or MPOE (demarcation point or main/minimum point of entry) - it’s where the phone company’s cable enters the building and gets split out into the individual lines for each apartment. In newer apartment buildings, they’re probably not easily accessed by tenants.
They’re much easier to access on houses where you don’t have 75 neighbors all paranoid that you’re going to tap into their lines to spy on them or to steal their long distance service. Or a phone company that’s justifiably concerned that people will get in there and mess it up. So many wires…which one is your line? And for comparison, here’s a simple demarc on a house.
In either case, there’s a regular modular jack that signifies the end of the phone company’s wiring, and your inside wiring plugs into it. If you unplug the house wiring here and plug in the DSL modem, you can then assess if the problem is with the phone company or with your wires - if the DSL is still slow, it’s on their side, but if your connection is suddenly screaming fast, then you’ve got bad wiring, and it’s your responsibility to fix.
Ah, okay. Yeah, I have no idea where that would be in this building, and even if I knew I doubt I’d be able to get to it. But I assume if there are wiring problems, that’s my landlord’s responsibility to fix, correct?
White wire???
That’s not normal in phone wiring. You would typically have a blue/white & white/blue pair, a orange/white pair, etc. (Really old phone wiring would have solid red, green, yellow, black wires, but not if you have CAT-5 circuits.)
How many wires were in there, and what colors were they?
Pinging www.l.google.com [74.125.95.147] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=25ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=24ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=247
Reply from 74.125.95.147: bytes=32 time=26ms TTL=247
Ping statistics for 74.125.95.147:
Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 10, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 24ms, Maximum = 27ms, Average = 26ms
[/COLOR]
If your connection isn’t great it could be reflected in two ways - either dropped packets or a particular ping whose time is significantly higher than the others (i.e, 25, 27, 24, 1803, 27)
Eep! Your telephone port isn’t fully wired. Nor is your Ethernet. Ethernet can be split, but I wouldn’t expect top speed; I don’t know about phones, but I expect AT&T will throw up their hands and say, “Not our problem, guv.” What sort of cowboy contractor did your landlord get in?
Another quality hack-job by Billy-Jo-Bob’s House o’ Dial Tone and Fancy Fone Wiring, a subsidiary of Get the Cash and Scram Enterprises. :rolleyes:
What you’ve got there is a mess. Ethernet theoretically only needs four of the eight wires in a Cat5 cable to work, but cheating like this is not a valid installation.
Sharing the cable with phone wiring is also a bad idea. The flying white wire is actually a white wire with an orange tracer - one of the two wires for what would be your second phone line. Normally, phone wiring uses the blue pair for Line 1, Line 2 is on the orange pair, Line 3 is green and Line 4 is brown. It’s rare to use the green and brown pairs in residental phone wiring - thoughtful installers will wrap them backwards along the cable jacket in case someone needs a spare pair in the future.
You said the building’s LAN service isn’t working - just as well, based on that wiring. You’re all but guaranteed to have kajillions of bad packets and re-transmits. It might be OK for 10 meg, but 100 meg will have problems and I guarantee gigabit Ethernet will only laugh at you.
As for making the phone wiring work, that’s going to depend on your state and whatever rules are established by the Public Utilities Commission. It might be up to the building owner to fix, or it might be up to you. Either way, the phone company will have nothing to do with the Ethernet, and it’s often hard to get them interested in line quality for DSL, so long as the line is usable for voice calls.
Oy, you have my sympathy–I just recently switched from cable to DSL and I went 'round and 'round with Qwest over the wiring to the house. I haven’t had a landline in ten years and when I did have it the thing was notorious for never working when it rained (in Oregon :rolleyes: ) so let’s just say my faith in its integrity was minimal at best. Add in the fact that the old phone line was on entirely the wrong end of the house and we’d have to string cable inside–well, just no. So I made it excruciatingly clear to the salesperson I signed up with that they WILL have to come out and restring a line (consisting of wire made in THIS century) to the house, on the north side of the house, and also install the little box since the old line just kinda butts right into the wall–that’s craftsmanship, that is! Of course, on installation day nobody showed up because they insisted they could get a live wire signal on their end so all is well and we’re DSL ready! Whereupon I told them they were wrong and squirrels had eaten the line and they needed to come back out. Then I went out with a Leatherman “squirrel model” tool and creatively mangled the line. The tech was pissy about it, but fuck him. I’m paying for the installation and agreeing to a two year contract and I am damned well not going to try to connect a multiple computer home network that our livelihoods depend on to sixty year old wiring!
Yeah, that was what I suspected when I saw that both ports were sharing one Cat5 cable.
I tried running the ping tests and such above and the whole service crashed on me. So now I’m leeching off of someone else’s open router elsewhere in the building. I might just cancel the DSL altogether, considering that I’m getting decent speeds off of this other person.
After three online chats and a couple of phone calls, I convinced AT&T to run a line test and the results were, as you might imagine, not good. The technician is coming tomorrow afternoon. I’m sure the tech and my landlord will have a very entertaining argument over whose fault this is. I’m just sorry I won’t be home to hear it.
