Hanley

pimmo

Hopefully you could shed some light on this

I was chatting to my boss yesterday and he was telling me he pays for 20MB broadband with VM, however, he is constantly receiving 1MB.

He's spoken to various support people (1st line I think) and a guy rang him yesterday and asked him to do a netstat -a, he then asked him how many ports his pc was listening on and my boss answered 8.

The guy said ahh that's your problem, you should only be listening on 4, that's why you're only gettign 1MB. My boss is manager of a 3rd line windows / ad support team and disagreed with this and therefore asked him what 4 ports should he should be listening on - the guy said he didn't know but that was his problem.

So my boss plugged his laptop directly into his modem and that was listening on similar numbers of ports and only getting 1MB (he was talked through testing it from VMs test download site).

Now something is posessing me to climb to the 9th floor of our building and scream from the rooftops "that's the biggest load of bo11ox I've heard in all my my life"

He had previously spoken to another techie who checked his make / model of modem etc and was told it was adequate for 20MB.

I checked my pc and I'm listening on way more than 8 ports

I'd be interested to hear your take on it.

Cheers

Hanley

hodgy0_2

sorry to but in Hanley

but when you say 1mb, is that the router reporting the line speed or a speed test program

i your right the ports thing is bollox

however the only thing an ISP can guarantee is the speed between the WAN interface on your modem/router and the exchange (plus thru its POP infrastructure)

Hanley

VM directed him to an uncapped VM download site which they said gives accurate results as to the current download speed.

hodgy0_2

mmm these tests are all quite subjective and the results can depend on a number of things

somethings you have no control over -- like the bandwith to and from the destination webserver

but things you might try are the MTU settings on the router and your PC

also the TCP windows size -- these are set in the regsitry so prob not for the novice

these all effect the perceived "download" speed seen by you

but 1mb out of 20mb does seems wrong

Hanley

VM have confirmed (how I'm not sure) that he is only receving 1MB.

The question was more directed at the statement regarding listening on 8 ports