Downtime?

[Tom B]

Matt,

Do you know about any downtime on your network?

I've just had about 1 hour of no service, and now it's suddenly come back to life, I was just wondering if it was at your end or mine.

Thanks
Tom

[Toonshorty]

It'll be your end I think.

I've been fine. Last time I had no connection was a fibre cable between a few exchanges and the newcastle node became damaged, lost BB for about an hour.

Wait for Matt to confirm.

[Matt]

Nothing that i'm aware of but looking at your other thread, you use a Netgear. They are awful routers IMHO. If and when the line drops, as will happen on the majority of ADSL lines at some point, Netgears can take their time in logging back on.

Out of all the brands of routers that we come across, only Netgear appear to have this issue and when I last looked in to it, appeared to be related to the Netgear software.

Matt

[Toonshorty]

They're not awful routers. I mean, I had a NETGEAR DG834GT; If I'm honest, that was a very poor router however I currently own the DGN2000 and I've not had a single problem with it so far, it's been great.

The modem in the DG834GT is probably quite poor, my problems were with the router and the DHCP part of it.

[Matt]

Each to their own ;) Along with Belkin, Netgear routers are the ones we get most queries about in regard to speed and latency issues. Swapping them out for something like a Speedtouch restores normality.

For that reason alone, we don't like them. After all, what is the point of having a router if it has issues passing traffic.

PC World do not help. They only seem to stock Netgear and Belkin (and maybe Linksys) at vastly inflated prices. Customers buy the most expensive thinking it'll be the best when sadly, they are often the worst. I had to get my mum a Belkin from PC World, as the Linksys, also from there had rubbish wireless range. Unfortunately, the Belkin took a nice stable line (8128k / 27db attn / 9db / Fast) and some how managed to make BT alter the profile (6000k~ / 27db attn / 15db / Interleaved).

Ended up taking it back and buying her a Vigor 2820n. Since, no problems.

Matt

[Toonshorty]

Belkin, that IS a company which I'd never buy a router from.

I hate PC World, I understand technology well (I build my own computers etc.) and PC World is one shop I'd never enter. Their latest graphics card is the 8600GT, we're three generations on from that!

NETGEAR are the most commonly used routers, therefore they're going to be the manufacturer with the most reports to some extent. It's all about proportion I guess.

I'd buy a speedtouch but there aren't any real shops I'd trust that sell them, other than dodgy looking sites on the net.

[Matt]

Sometimes you have to go to PC World - just like I did when I urgently needed a router. I of course, left out why I had to get the Linksys from there in the first place. *cough* someone bricked my mums Netgear. How ironic. ;)

I'd buy a speedtouch but there aren't any real shops I'd trust that sell them, other than dodgy looking sites on the net.

Broadband Buyer get our vote.

Matt

[Tom B]

If my Netgear is a bad router, what model of Speedtouch would you recommend? Here are the stats for my line (I'm using DGTeam firmware and have decreased SNR to 80%):

ADSL Link Downstream Upstream
Connection Speed 2944 kbps 832 kbps
Line Attenuation 60.0 db 31.5 db
Noise Margin 4.9 db 7.0 db

After looking, it seems my attenuation has increased by 1db (YAY -.-)

Any help would be appreciated
Thanks
Tom

[Matt]

All depends on the features you want really. The nice thing about Speedtouch, which is why we like them is that the software and hardware (DSL) does not change. Compare that to say the Netgear 834. They have 5 revisions of it spanning three/four different chipsets. Only v4 was any good.

Speedtouch 536 - Single network/USB
Speedtouch 546 - 4 port network
Speedtouch 585 v7 - 4 port network/wireless b/g

Matt