The majority of cases I deal with on a day to day basis, are those of slow connection speeds. Speed is a big deal with today's internet users - they want to avoid the dreaded video buffering and lengthy waits for page loading. This is all fine and dandy, your ISP should have no issues with helping improve your speeds.
However, before you ring your ISP, there are a few steps you can try yourself to ensure that the problem isn't being caused by something that you have complete control over. You can make your life so much easier by taking a little bit of time running through these checks before putting that call in to the techies - they'll ask you to go through them anyway, so save time.
Identify a pattern - if there is one
Do you only experience slower speeds at certain times of the day? If so, make a note of the times this performance reduction occurs. Please remember, however, that you are bound to experience some drop in speed during peak hours - this is an unfortunate fact that many people ignore. You are not the only person wanting to stream Eastenders from BBC iPlayer at 6.30pm on a Friday night. The internet gets congested, and you must deal with it.
A genuine pattern to make a note of, for example, would be if your performance rapidly reduces when it rains. There could be an exposed joint somewhere in BT's copper network that needs attention. Make sure you gather your evidence to prove the poor performance during this time or your ISP may shrug it off.
Check your internal setup
This is possibly the most important step you should take before contacting your ISP. I would say that in about 9/10 cases, connection problems are caused by either an incorrect setup or a piece of equipment gone bad.
I have included a rough diagram below of what an ideal home setup should look like - or at least, this is the setup you should adhere to before calling your ISP. As earlier, they will ask you to do this when you phone them so save the time and do it beforehand.
You will notice that the two setups are a little different. The NTE2000 socket already has a filter built into the faceplate. The advantage of this being you don't need to connect a micro-filter to any socket in your house. It does, however, mean your router must be connected to the NTE2000 socket - it won't work anywhere else.
On each of these sockets, you will find a line on the faceplate along with 2 screws. If you remove these screws, you will be able to pull the faceplate away from the socket - revealing the "test socket". Connecting your router into here, via a micro-filter, will bypass and therefore rule out your internal wiring causing the speed issues.
Gathering your evidence
So, you've checked your setup as outline above but your speeds are still suffering. Now is the time to contact your ISP. Don't be surprised if they don't believe you first off though, because they can "see your line is running at xMbps", whatever your speed is supposed to be.
If they say this, but your speeds are registering much lower than that, you have what we call a "throughput" problem. The only way to prove the fault is with your ISP's network, and not your PC, is to run a series of tests via the command prompt on your PC. You will need to run trace routes to see how the data is travelling across the internet. I will show you how to run these below.
Don't worry if you don't understand the results. You don't really need to. The only part you are concerned about is the time (ms) that each hop has taken. Generally speaking, any figure less than 100ms is considered highly acceptable. Most applications will not have any problem with this much latency.
In my example above, it shows that the network is operating very well and, if I was experiencing slow speeds, is not the cause of the problem.
Please be aware that these figures will be extremely higher if you are trace routing to a website or server that is in a different country - purely because the data has further to travel.
Speed tests
If your latency is consistently reading in excess of 120ms, from the 3rd hop onwards, you will seriously need to consider reporting the issue to your ISP. Run a couple of speedtests at different times of the day to make sure it isn't related to increased traffic during peak times and then give your ISP a call.
Once they have got through all the nitty gritty, request an email address to send your results into. Attach your trace routes and speed tests for reference.
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