I have SBC ( now AT&T) DSL at my house. Over time, the broadband service degrades pretty seriously…last night I had slightly more connectivity than if I Were using a 56K modem over a set of clean lines. But, if I reset the DSL modem and the D-Link router, I can get it to go back up to 600Kb/sec, which is much more desirable.
Because of this, and the fact that my contract renewal is going to come up soon, I thought I’d ask around here to see what you guys think the problem is.
Do you think it’s the modem, the router, both, or is it just the sort of thing to expect with DSL?
The cost difference is significant going from DSL to anything else, as I pay 14.99/month for DSL and cable charges around 50/month for broadband.
Do you mean you can get 600 kbps (kilobits per second) or 600 kB/sec (kilobytes per second)?
I’m not picking on you. Many people ignore --or even deny-- the distinction between upper or lowercase b (bits vs. Bytes) and both are common measures of transfer speeds. Kilo- is properly k, not K, but that rarely causes confusion (though I could recount a particularly clueless video debate where colot temperature got confounded with frame and data rates)
The DSL systems I know don’t go much above 640 kbps, but many cable systems (including my own) can easily exceed 640 kB/sec ( ~5 Mbps). YMMV, depending on local carriers. For many people (myself included), this is an inducement to switch. There are only a few specific situations where I get to exploit all that extra speed (most public servers won’t feed you as fast as you can swallow), but those situations are worth the extra cost to me.
Have you tried resetting only the DSL terminal emulator (modem) or your LAN router? If it’s the router, then switching is unlikely to help. If it’s the “modem”, then the problem could either be the modem (which the DSL provider may replace free) or some goofiness with the ISP trying to cut corners. I’d definitely check:
and see what local users have reported re: network issues, reliability, alternative DSL carriers, and cable. It’s the local service details that count most.
I had this problem 5 years ago with my cable modem! I kept having to reset it because it kept getting slower and slower until the connection would drop. Repeated calls to the cable company resulted in nothing, until about my 50th call when they admitted that something was wrong with the local node and they were fixing it that day. The next day, the problem went away.
When we were on DSL, we just got used to having to reset the modem every week or so.
I never noticed a slow drop in speed, just every so often, no internet, which was solved by resetting both our modem and router. We just reset both, because we were never sure which one was malfunctioning.