In which Our Heroes continue to wrestle with our internet connection.

[bookzombie]

We did all the normal stuff like closing down the router and restarting it again and we were still having consistent drop-out.

Then yesterday I had the mad (mad I tell you!) idea to upgrade the firmware on the router (Netgear D834 if anyone is interested in that sort of thing) which, overall, seems to have helped with the drop outs.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have helped with the speed. It's a bit better right now than it was this afternoon, which was taking an age to do anything, but still fairly slow, particularly the patch that I'm downloading for City of Heroes which is sitting around the 6-7K/sec. P. is downloading the same patch with similar speeds.

So the question is, what is the root cause? I've checked the diagnostics on the router and it appears to be connecting at a good speed and not registering any issues. Our ISP is virgin.net, which doesn't have a great reputation, but has been fine for us until the last few weeks.

I would guess that assuming the router is okay there are two possible issues:

1. It's just particularly heavy traffic at the moment (weekend, lots of people ordering Christmas pressies online, for example) so tough.
2. Virgin.net's servers are stuffed.

If the latter, I'd have to seriously consider changing our service provider.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Comments

Re: Lies and statistics

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was reported on the BBC website as well. Major corporations not being forthcoming about performance - is anyone still surprised...?

Re: Lies and statistics

[themis1.livejournal.com]

Can't say I am, 'tis true, but it is darned irritating when you're wacking something in Guild Wars and the connection goes dead!!

Re: Lies and statistics

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

I'm probably going to regret saying this but I can count on one hand the number of drop-outs we've had on City of Heroes. Lots of lag issues a while ago (which was a CoH server issue rather than our problem) but few drop-outs.

I know I shouldn't have said that out loud...