What to do?

First, no single test is enough to determine the speed of your line. The internet has weather, as does your ISP, and the server you are downloading from. Weather can delay delivery, as any postman will tell you!

Once you have concluded, perhaps by comparing others' results, that your speed is not what it should be, here is a check list of things to worry about if you have a DSL line.

• ISP Weather. Your ISP may be suffering a "brown-out" at the time you tested. Only once consistent slow results, or a pattern, can be established, can you rule out temporary brownouts by your ISP.

• Internet weather. More rarely, the internet as a whole, at key choke points, can become slow. Perhaps there is a fiber cut, or some router failure. Internet storms such as these rarely last long if they are big. But smaller, more local storms, may be more persistent.

• ISP Routing. Larger ISPs have many options to route you onto the net, and at times they may be sub-optimal for you or your area. Normally this goes hand in hand with much higher than expected latency than you should expect.

• Backhaul. Backhaul is the path of your data between you, and your first visible hop. To get to your first hop, your data may have to travel from CO to CO and even be carried across country to get to your ISP. All of this is invisible to you, but poor backhaul routing does result in high latency to your first hop, or worse.

• DSL Interference. DSL operates across a wide frequency spectrum, and particular ADSL and G.lite, can vary speed downwards in response to noise on the line. There are often no user visible statistics on whether this is happening, and the only symptom is poor performance. Checking around the house for possible sources can sometimes reap rewards of immediate speed gain. Things such as poor house wiring, long home phone cable runs (rather than locating the DSL modem as close to the entry point of the line as possible), or in the case of ADSL, micro-filters of insufficient quality, or being installed backwards, older fax machines, or poor quality phone extension handsets. Even cordless phones and floro lights should be regarded with suspicion. By a process of elimination though, you can determine which if any of these possible problems is the cause of your persistent poor speed.

• Home alarm systems, installed "in-series" to your phone line, can ruin an ADSL signal. placing them on another run with a filter should be a top priority.

• Slow computer, USB modems.. CPU can be a factor in speed tests, particular java driven ones. Anything less than a pentium 100mhz CPU, and anything less than windows 98 cannot be trusted with more user-friendly speed tests. Even a basic computer, using command prompt FTP, should be able to outrun even fast DSL lines though. USB modems, particularly ones entirely software (driver) designed, consume CPU, and should also be considered as possible sources of slowdown.

• Poor or dubious quality ethernet card. Even though the ethernet card is the most simple and proven part of the whole DSL setup, some no-brand type ether cards, especially when paired with doubtful or older ether drivers, can cause an interesting array of performance or other weird problems.. things such as web pages being viewable, but uploading failing, for example, has more than once been traced to a dodgy ethernet card.

• Card conflicts. Especially with internet DSL modems, interrupt/slot related difficulties with windows and drivers can cause problems that are solved by re-arrangement of cards, or by removal of cards that are not needed. Stripping a PC down to the minimum when testing may quickly identify this as the source of any frustrating problems.

• Home alarm systems, installed "in-series" to your phone line, can ruin an ADSL signal. Placing them on another run with a filter should be a top priority. This comment is actually the way it's designed to work. It's called 'seizure' - the process of ensuring 100% access to the phone line in the case of an alarm condition. The ideal scenario is to use a POTS splitter so that the phone and internet service is SPLIT before it gets to the demarcation block. This ensures that the alarm is connected to the PHONE side of the line without affecting the MODEM side (connected to the ADSL modem) of the line. This will allow an alarm to still have 'seizure' and also 'share' an ADSL line with an alarm system on the phones, WITHOUT FILTERs. Filters are generally poor quality and fail on occasion, but a pots splitter has much less likeliness of failure or accidental removal. Moving an alarm to an 'extension' defeats the 'seizure' of the telco line invalidating any assurances of reliable transmission.

There are a few things could cause this. Your DSL modem may be malfunctioning. If this is the case you should call your ISP and tell them to replace your modem, or, if the modem is yours, either have it serviced or replace it.

In order to determine whether the problem is inside your home or outside, take your modem to the NID (Network Inteface Device) and connect directly. This eliminates any inside wiring.

If you are able to sync up fine outside of your house at your Telephone box (more commonly known as the NID, Network Interface Device) Then your inside wiring will need to be inspected. You will have to notify your telephone company and tell them to fix the problem. Note this will cost you money because it's outside of your ISP/DSL service.

Your telephone line could be losing quality. Line noise, electronics on the line, or a short on the line can break up a sync signal. You will have to tell your ISP that you keep losing sync and want to have your line checked for problems. They should open a trouble ticket with your ILEC/CLEC and they will inspect the lines. In most cases they can find the problem this way.

There are a few things could cause this. Your DSL modem may be malfunctioning. If this is the case you should call your ISP and tell them to replace your modem, or, if the modem is yours, either have it serviced or replace it.

In order to determine whether the problem is inside your home or outside, take your modem to the NID (Network Inteface Device) and connect directly. This eliminates any inside wiring.

If you are able to sync up fine outside of your house at your Telephone box (more commonly known as the NID, Network Interface Device) Then your inside wiring will need to be inspected. You will have to notify your telephone company and tell them to fix the problem. Note this will cost you money because it's outside of your ISP/DSL service.

Your telephone line could be losing quality. Line noise, electronics on the line, or a short on the line can break up a sync signal. You will have to tell your ISP that you keep losing sync and want to have your line checked for problems. They should open a trouble ticket with your ILEC/CLEC and they will inspect the lines. In most cases they can find the problem this way.

Frequent loss of line sync (the normally green light on your DSL modem goes out, blinks, turns yellow or red, and the Internet is suddenly unreachable) can be caused by:

If the problem is regular - for example, at roughly the same time almost every day and it lasts for some time, you should investigate whether or not local line interference is the root cause. This could be: street lights going on, local transmitting towers of any kind, lights or electrical devices in or around the home that are possibly routed near your inside wiring. Unfortunately, having successfully guessed this cause, it is often very hard to correct ... even another copper line might have the same problem.

If you suspect modem malfunction, check for heat. Replace the modem if you can. If it is an internal modem, change slots and try running with minimum other internal cards. (Remove SCSI cards, Soundblaster cards and so on.) This is to verify that the root cause is not a plain old Windows hardware conflict.

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